Popular reviews

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  Review by Branson Reese

  The original version of sending your friend an email like “hey can you take a look at this?” with a link in that leads to a video of a guy’s head exploding. Actually that’s probably not true. The original version of that was probably prehistoric middle schoolers tricking each other into getting eaten by lions or some shit.

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  Review by Eli Hayes 5

  A fascinating idea, poorly executed. I really don't know what rating I would give this film so, for now, I am going to refrain from rating it altogether. The inclusion of simulated scenes seems to remove any depth or insight that the authentic scenes might have had. At times, affecting, and at times, unintentionally hilarious, but overall, simply disappointing.

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 10

  This film has a weird sort of mystique for me, one I am sure many of you are familiar with if not for this film then for others like it, which is to say, films with cult status and intriguing VHS boxes that sat low on the shelf at the video store. Never got to rent this as a kid, so its mystique is entirely nostalgic, and I'm unfortunately unable to go into this assuming it was real. That suspension of disbelief would have been gut-churning, disturbing, and amazing, the sort of transgressive experience i find myself gravitating toward despite my intellectual reservations.

  Regardless of the film's authenticity, it's... well, gross. Gory. Disgusting. The animal abuse is awful, uncalled for,…

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  Review by 8 b i t m u r d e r b o t ∆ ∆ ★★★ 4

  - I grew up in a duplex. We had an assortment of neighbors over the years and one was Jim 'the biker'. He had a hot girlfriend and he was cool. I was just a small impressionable 9 or 10 year old.

  Not sure how all this played out but I was telling him how much I liked horror movies (yeah) and he let me borrow a box of vhs tapes for the weekend. A small cardboard box with possibly stolen VHS tapes was the most exciting thing a boy could have in his possession.
  I got them inside. My parents were at work. WTF? Who was watching me? I used the upstairs VCR. I picked a tape and grabbed…

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  Review by Will Sloan

  Listened to the Blu-Ray commentary track for this bad-boy while doing household chores. It's a good'un. Director "Conan Le Cilaire" (John Alan Schwartz, who died in August) tells all: what was real, what was faked (most of it), how the fake stuff was faked, where the "real" footage was acquired, etc. Footage of insects killing each other was shot for a nature documentary, and he points out how much more disturbing it seems in the context of Faces of Death. I was relieved to learn that the dogfight scene is simulated -- in fact, the dogs were mating, and the crew threw fake blood on them.

  "Conan" notes that the film was funded with Japanese money and intended only for…

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  Review by ecem ★★★★★

  i am insane

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  Review by Graham ★★

  How to rate death? Well, as it turns out, Faces of Death's shtick is based on a documentary style narration that takes the viewer around the world to witness, well, death. In all its forms. So, I guess here, we are rating it based purely on entertainment value 😬

  Cadavers in morgues, mummified Mexicans, all that stuff was almost interesting but for the monotone delivery of the seemingly comatose narrator. I mean, sure, death is not usually a laughing matter, but come on dude. At least pretend you're trying to make it interesting for us.

  So then we get to the truly awful stuff. Animal cruelty, dog fighting, bashed monkeys for food, halal cow murder. Eek, this is fucking nasty…

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  Review by Kai Perrignon ½ 3

  possibly a CIA black op designed to inure civilians to the sight of death by making it as dull as possible.

  no one has said "you gotta watch Faces of Death" for decades, and yet I watched it. why? what disease do i have that makes me think i needed to see this? why do i feel certain that i will watch Faces of Death 2?

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  Review by DANIEL ★★½ 9

  when I was an edgelord pre-teen and the internet was primarily something they ran scare articles about, Faces Of Death was the tape to have. it was hush-hush at the local video stores in a way even porn or that weird taboo shit never was. it was as close to a snuff film or extreme transgressive film many of us would ever get. it became a kind of fixation among my crew, this shibboleth of necrotic grotesquerie, some horror that would go beyond our imagining. we were all a bunch of shitty little hood kids who were simultaneously jaded and naive (something this golden age of tv seems to think is an endless wellspring of sentimentality, for some fucking reason)…

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ★★

  Faces of death is lame and nasty, real and fake, controversial and dated, deep and shallow. Faces of Death is a mixed bag of qualities and defects, and ends up being a tremendously bad and varied documentary that treats death in several ways.

  50% of the footage is real, whereas the other 50% has been proven staged and fake. This film goes from Mexico (Las Momias de Guanajuato) to Africa, from the Amazon to Southeast Asia, from hospitals, prisons and morgues to slaughterhouses.

  John Alan Schwartz (aka Conan Le Cilaire as a director, aka Alan Black as a writer [lol]) directs a half fake, controversial and undeniably graphic and disturbing shockumentary that easily enters into the mondo genre.

  Honestly, this…

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  Review by Jordan James Brooks ★★

  Does what it says on the tin.

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  Review by Darren ★★ 4

  "Perhaps the greatest disaster of all is one that man has created himself. lf nature doesn't destroy the environment, it is very possible that the human being will."

  Gotta love the use of swing jazz as the soundtrack to suicide stock footage; La La Land couldn't have done an even better use of jazz.

  The advances of the Internet, especially LiveLeak and the subreddit r/watchpeopledie, has really made this film tame- since nothing in this film is real at all. Hell, even the rip off film "Traces of Death" contains actual death scenes, while this does include some actual animal death scenes, I'm not safe to say there are any human deaths in this film.

  I personally wouldn't watch it…