[film club] Sony Revives Faces of Death

The original gooner gore flick returns. We breakdown Sony's effort to revive 1978's Faces of Death by way of director Daniel Goldhaber.

I’m not a film expert, but I like the Faces of Death series. The first time I saw this movie was at my grandparents’ house. I’d seen it listed at the top of a creepy movie iceberg video, so I looked it up and watched it after finding it on YouTube. That is how I discovered this film. Let’s continue with the analysis.

Faces of Death, the infamous 1970s shockumentary series, is getting a new release this April. This week the first trailer for the film was released, leaving me with questions about what might happen. Will the movie show footage of real deaths? Will my local Mexican cinema play the movie?

If you haven’t seen Faces of Death, here is a link to a strange website (warning) so you can watch it on a Sunday afternoon. It contains real footage, some scenes that are not, and one scene with an animal that will give you goosebumps: Faces of Death (1978) on EffedUpMovies

And here is the trailer:

Before I start with this poor analysis, I will write that I liked the new logo for this release. But the way the clips will be presented, not so much. I also didn’t know that Faces of Death is now owned by Sony (which is why it is no longer on the Internet Archive or YouTube), nor did I know what the plot was going to be about.

But you can watch it here, on Vimeo

This new release is directed by Daniel Goldhaber (director of Cam and How to Blow Up a Pipeline) and features performances by Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery, Josie Totah, Charli XCX, and Jermaine Fowler.

According to Polygon, the story will follow a teenage moderator of an online video platform who has to delete offensive material. She suddenly encounters a group of killers who are replicating scenes from Faces of Death (1978) against their victims, and she will have to determine which of the videos are real and which are AI generated.

It is a modern adaptation of Faces of Death, but it abandons the shockumentary format to follow a fictional story. I hope I am wrong about this when the film is released or another trailer comes out, because I do not understand how a movie with that plot would work with the name Faces of Death.

It would not make as much sense to make a shockumentary of clips nowadays because there are so many real death videos for free on the internet—duh. But I think it would have been better if that moderator had some kind of video library (like in the original Faces of Death) and the plot revolved around her. With the help of investigators, she could decipher which videos—while showing real and fake clips, explaining why they are not false and where they happened—were made with AI and which were not, in order to catch the killers.

Reviving a film series like this is understandable because it is easy to generate money by creating morbid curiosity through the presentation of real videos of deaths or accidents. You can also see your favorite or semi-famous actors die in the acted parts.

All that remains is to watch Goldhaber’s films (the director of this new movie) and imagine what it would look like.

So, there will not be a shockumentary, nor will we have a pathologist presenter, nor monologues about death. It is going to be a horror thriller film following a story. Now let’s talk about the trailer.

The trailer begins with supposed recordings of real events: buildings falling, a bear dragging a person, monkeys, and executions. This is why I think that maybe it will feature real death footage. There is also staged footage from previous films, such as the execution of a prisoner in the electric chair and the scene of the monkey with its head split open.

However, we still have not been introduced to the protagonist or the antagonists. But in one part of the trailer, we could see that one of the deaths carried out by this group of assassins is a reference to the monkey scene. Now the monkey is a person, and the executioners are robots that hit them on the head with something. Why robots? Did a group of assassins have time to build robots to kill their victims? Maybe.

Also, near the end of the trailer, there is another fake death scene where two girls are dancing on the train tracks for a video. The train appears, and the two want to escape, but one of them trips and is run over.

If they are going to use real footage of real deaths, and if they release it in theaters worldwide (except for 46 countries), it would be interesting to see the audience’s reactions in a movie theater.

Personally, I hope it does poorly with the critics—like most shockumentaries—but well at the box office. I really want to see it because it looks like it is going to be good.