- Year
- 1978
- Country
- USA
- Runtime
- 109 min
- Director
- John Alan Schwartz
- Updated
- 9 Aug 2026
- Obscurity
- known (28/100)
- Also known as
- The Original Faces of Death
Faces of Death
Mostly fake, entirely cynical, and a rental-shop legend regardless.
A supposed documentary tour of death in all its forms, narrated by a fictional pathologist, and mostly fake, which almost nobody watching in a 1980s rental knew or wanted to know. Its reputation as the ultimate forbidden tape did all the work its content could not.
It is cynical, largely staged and historically important only as a phenomenon: proof that the promise of the real, however hollow, would empty video shelves. The animal footage, unlike the human, is genuine and is the hardest part.
More interesting as an artifact than as a film.
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Written about
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An Oscar-nominated love ballad, a beach of dying sea turtles, a murder charge beaten before the film even opened, and a monkey brain made of cauliflower.
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