FACES OF DEATH is Getting a New Feature Film Reimagining From Legendary Pictures
Do you remember the grisly and disturbing VHS franchise Faces of Death? I remember watching the original movie with my friends when I was a teenager. They were pretty damn messed up, but I haven’t thought about Faces of Death in years. Hell, until today… I had no idea that these Faces of Death films were filled with fake footage! At the time, I thought what I had watched was real and it messed me up a bit. It was one of the few films that I regretted watching. It’s kinda weird getting information all these years later that most of it was fake! Some of it was real, though.
Well, Legendary Pictures is producing a reimaging of the Faces of Death franchise with Isa Mazzei and Daniel Goldhaber set to write and direct. This is the team behind the 2018 psychological thriller Cam, which was inspired by Mazzei’s experience as a camgirl.
The original movie was released in 1978 and it was meant to be a faux documentary. It had “the conceit of a pathologist exploring gruesome ways to die via footage purportedly culled from around the world. In reality, most of the death scenes were staged and faked, but no matter, the movie had its producers’ desired effect: outrage, revulsion, banning (although not in 52 countries as hyped by the film’s makers), and, of course, a money-making hit that spawned sequels and imitators.”
That original movie was written and directed by John Allan Schwartz, and he used multiple pseudonyms for several crew jobs on the movie. The film spawned several sequels including Faces of Death II (1981), Faces of Death III (1985), The Worst of Faces of Death (1987), Faces of Death IV (1990), Faces of Death V (1995) Faces of Death VI (1996).
The first movie was actually released theatrically but when it hit video stores in the 1980s it launched into the cult stratosphere. I remember the skull on the cover and the whole “Banned in 40+ Countries” label at the top. That wasn’t true! MPI, an Illinois-based company has kept the original films in circulation for the past 30 years.
The new film revolves around “a female moderator of a YouTube-like website, whose job is to weed out offensive and violent content and who herself is recovering from a serious trauma, that stumbles across a group that is recreating the murders from the original film. But in the story primed for the digital age and age of online misinformation, the question faced is are the murders real or fake?”
This is actually an interesting concept that could make for a good film. I don’t know, we’ll see how this comes together. Do you remember Faces of Death? Did you ever watch any of the films? Did you know most of the footage was fake!?
Source: THR