https://view.email.hollywoodreporter...ea22946cb6425f


For those who don't know what this IP is, the original movies were fake scripted snuff films from the late 1970s to 1980s with supposedly real depictions of death and murder. They filmed it like it was a documentary.

They were very popular in the VHS era and when I was in Elementary school. I think I saw most of them.

Yeah this does not need this...

Oh man, I remember those. The tapes were actually illegal in Canada (at least in Ontario, and in other countries as well) at the time because they were so notorious, people thought that they were practically snuff films. I smuggled one from the US once to see what all the fuss was about, and it turned out to be laughably fake crap, I was like "this BS is illegal??"

I guess the name itself still has some cache though because everyone kid heard of these back in the 80's. For all their awfulness, the films (and their imitators) have a fascinating history though, I'd recommend the book "Killing for Culture", it's a great read that covers all these "snuff" films.

I remember seeing the vhs tapes in rental stores but never watched them. I'm guessing they'll fit right in with the torture porn genre.

Can't one find all the videos you'd want on-line of real-life deaths and murders? This seems about as good an idea as rebooting those nudist camp movies from the 1950s.

This. The Internet hosts stuff 10000-times worse than those bits of FOD that were real. That said, a sleazy modern reboot might be fun.

Not to mention that back in the 80s and early 90s them being available on shitty quality VHS was half the “charm”. I’m not sure seeing it on Blu-ray, 4K, or streaming off of Amazon is going to have the same effect as passing around a skeazy VHS tape with all your friends.

The audience for this would seem to be people who don't know about sites like bestgore and liveleak.

I hope for an update of Red Asphalt...

I suspect the audience is old fools like me. Ain't nobody gonna go into this thinking it's real. It's just a nostalgia property.

I remember seeing that in driving school. Some of those images still haunt me till this day.

As for Faces of Death, that just sounds like a bad idea to me IMO.
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Wow, you put that a lot better than I was going to.

Whatever painful form of death you can think of, ISIS probably released a video of it.

Pass.

This past year had enough death.

I remember my friend bringing up this tape in the mid 1990's. He ended up renting it from Blockbuster. We watch it for a while, but it didn't seem that interesting or have any real graphic footage. I don't we watched more than twenty minutes if it. I'm sure Youtube has a lot more real and graphic footage of this type of stuff if one really wanted to view it. Look up Budd Dwyer if you want to see something graphic. Youtube usually pulls the footage down of this, but occasionally you can find it on there.

I've seen some of the footage and read about this video. My understanding is that while most of the stuff is staged, a lot of the stuff involving already dead animals was real, kind of like Cannibal Holocaust. The dog fight was staged using strawberry jelly, but I think there was a scene with a sheep slaughterhouse.

The legend of Faces of Death is far more effective than the actual video. As a kid, hearing word of mouth of Faces of Death was far more terrifying than what I actually got when I watched some of it.

And yeah, the internet holds far more disturbing content without having to look that hard. I don’t remember a single thing from the Faces of Death videos but I saw a couple beheading videos online when I was younger than have haunted me ever since.

Blockbuster never would have carried Faces of Death.

Who needs that when you got 4chan Rekt threads?

All I recall from the video was a bunch of grainy and blurry footage, often without sound, and you could barely make out what was going on in the videos. I remember what looked like some hooded terrorists hanging three men, but don't remember much else from it.

I remember thinking it was odd that there would be enough camera footage back in those days of people getting killed to be able to make at least ten volumes of videos.

They had it at ours. Not all of the volumes, but maybe one or two. I don't know how long it stayed on the shelves there, but that was the place we would go on weekends to rent videos.

That these notorious videos were so difficult to track down was most of their mystique.

I remember in Junior High and High School, when these movies were whispered about. Someone knew somebody who had seen them. These movies were illegal to watch. Video stores weren't allowed to carry them.

I finally got to watch them my freshman year of college; there was this video store near the campus that stocked what seemed like every VHS movie ever released, and they had them.

It was fairly obvious that most of the material in these films, at lest the most outrageous stuff, was faked, with the rest being stock and newsreel footage. And if they didn't seem fake enough, the campy narration by "Francis Gross" should be the final nail in the coffin of authenticity.

These films are more fun if you don't actually see them, and just know about them through their reputation. Their reputation completely oversells them.

It's been many many years since I've seen these. But some of the moments I recall were:

Parachuter who just happens to land in an animal park lake filled with crocodiles and gets eaten alive

Cannibal ceremony in South America that just happens to be captured on tape

A convicted murderer who is electrocuted on death row

"Real news footage" of a bank robbery that went wrong that shows the dead bodies of patrons who were killed.

Live monkey brain being eaten in a Middle Eastern restaurant after his head is beaten with a hammer on the table


Francis B Gross cracked me up as the narrator and host. He was so over the top trying to be intentionally creepy. I remember one of the later editions that his character "died" so they got another weirdo as the host.

This is the only thing that I remember. I recall that his head was pulled up through a hole in the table and then hammered. The whole thrill of it back then was finding a Mom and Pop video store that didn't give a shit and would rent it to us kids at the time.

(Sharing my memory-lane story)

I was first introduced to it when my dad rented it in the mid-80's (I was about 9 or 10) and he invited my aunts over to watch it (I know, odd family) I occasionally snuck out from my bedroom to catch a couple segments. Such as: Gator attack on the ranger(?), the two execution scenes (Including the now-deleted gas chamber sequence) and the monkey brains.

Several years later, my friend's mom was cool enough to rent the next few "Sequels" for us (We still believed everything was real, btw) I remember we were both pissed off at "The Worst of Faces of Death" because it was mostly all rehash of Part 2. But then we later ran into Traces of Death and...Yikes! Nothing but realness there, folks!

And if I remember correctly, Francis Gross died under the new guy's scalpel. Duhn Duhn Duuuuhn!

There's a nice symmetry in hearing Mondo Kane's take on FOD!