- Year
- 1978
- Country
- USA
- Runtime
- 109 min
- Director
- John Alan Schwartz
- Updated
- 10 Aug 2026
- Obscurity
- known (28/100)
- Also known as
- The Original Faces of Death
- Banned in
- UK · Australia · New Zealand · Norway · Finland
Faces of Death
A prosecuted DPP video nasty, also banned in Australia, New Zealand, Norway and Finland.
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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Legal options in USA
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Written about
- Mondo: the shockumentary, 1962 to 1978
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.
- Banned, cut and confiscated
A Fulci print flown out of the country, an Australian rating that just means no, and a German court that filed The Evil Dead under criminal violence. Three states, three machines for making a film disappear.
Filed alongside
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A serious film about media atrocity that committed real atrocity.