Faces of Death II

First sequel in the Faces of Death franchise directed by John Alan Schwartz, presented and narrated by the self-proclaimed doctor Frances B. Gröss posing as "creative consultant", in fact the actor Michael Carr (The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp), with a music by Gene Kauer (Monstrosity). This American mondo-style documentary focuses on the show of violent deaths throughout the world in the past few years, in order to shock and provoke malaise and disgust within the spectator, turned into an accomplice of the "morbid fascination" of the crowd and its unhealthy voyeurism.

Opening with obscene bodies of accident victims, the documentary pontificates with a pseudo-history of conceptions about death, which has ended in "a multi-billion dollar industry". A fire in a West German building in 1979 is the pretext for showing a horribly burnt victim in a hospital. Then a joyful Tyrolean yodel introduces the frozen victims of the White Sunday avalanche catastrophe at the Brenner Pass between Austria and Italy in April 1975, which has caused "50 dead" (in fact in the whole Alps).

Ignominious and unbearable images go further, the car "having become the best trap for human life", with the victims of car accidents on a German Autobahn, "an idea of Adolf Hitler", carbonized or bloody bodies sharing the obsession of the later Cronenberg's Crash. And as "speed has become more valuable than human life", we go to assist to the Indianapolis 500-Mile Race of 1973, where fatal accidents have ended in flames.

The carnage goes on through other sports, with rodeo where bull riders and clowns are gored, and with boxing, "the most brutal of all professional sports", where the 1980 Los Angeles fight between the Welsh Johnny Owen and the Mexican Lupe Pintor for the Bantamweight World Championship has a fatal issue. As death invites herself for all the occasions, we watch also the exploits of these other "modern gladiators", the stuntmen, wondering who among Bobby Pesco, Chuck Strange and Kenny Powers will die or survive through their impossible "daredevil" attempts.

Death being definitely a spectacle, we follow air disasters with their lines of bodies, in Mexico with the 1979 crash of Western Airlines Flight 2605 and its 73 dead, and in Iran with the Flight 291's one and its 128 dead pilgrims. And as "any kind of modern transportation increases the odds of our own death", we can also take the train in Indian West Bengal to end in another deadly catastrophe.

Wars are of course great purveyors of death and horrors. Frances, while sipping his "home made tequila", can quit with regrets Salvador and its civil war, where "political ideas are more important than human life", showing before Stone's film piles of bodies killed for politics. And the Vietnam War on its side has provided "some of the most brutal atrocities in the history of mankind", showing the famous Downes's footage of the running napalm girl (Phan Thi Kim Phuc). Iran and its religious terror's victims, death having there become "a way of life", and Lebanon, with its dead children's bodies in the middle of the Palestino-Israeli conflict, are also in the party. And in this "colossal suicide pact", with an army budget wich has "no fiscal limits", nuclear weapons are also honored with the 1957 aerial explosion in Nevada during the Plumbbob Operation in front of guinea pig soldiers, who were to develop leukemias 24 years later.

National violences in the USA are not forgotten, with drug-linked ones through the arrestation of an "angel dust" PCP (phencyclidine) addict who has provoked a deadly car accident, or the reenacting of a bloody attack on a drugstore in Lowell, Napa, California. Terrorist ones are represented with the 1980 Hinckley's aggression against president Reagan, where the White House Press Secretary James Brady was permanently disabled.

As the mondo lesson has been well retained, animals' deaths are well present too, with those new-born lambs slain for their valuable furs, these rabbits bloodily cut in pieces in a slaughterhouse, other monkeys tortured in experiments "to prepare the USA for WW3", or other intelligent dolphins massacred for meat in Japan, with a dying fetus on a deck. But with "air and water contaminated", earth becoming "a toxic wasteland" while USA consumes "the half of ressources" with only "6% of world's population", "the war against nature will end in total human devastation".

Exoticism on its side is of course also in the show, like in every worthwhile mondo, with India and its cremations on "the banks of the Ganges River", and Cambodia with its lepers, victims of "this disease of the living dead". And Papua New Guinea, where "violence is a way of life", is especially featured, with footage from the sixties Bill Burrud's True Adventure TV series episode Cannibal Kings, showing a domestic dispute degenerated into an axe strike on the woman's head, another whose arm has been permanently distorted, and the third wearing in some kind as a revenge her eaten husband's foot as a necklace.

The documentary continues piling up shocking scenes to illustrate the desperately wide theme of death, with an autopsy of an intestinal cancer victim, a museum for murder victims in the coroner's building of New York, or the supposed head preserved in alcohol as "Western memorabilia" of the Californian bandit Joaquin Murrieta (featured in the 1936 film Robin Hood of El Dorado). But finally we don't learn quite a lot through these disparate sequences, the possible denunciation of some abuses being disqualified by the sensationalism.

And the film ends in Liberia, this former American colony dedicated to liberated slaves, with the 1980 trial of the ministers of the fallen Tolbert's regime, and the preparation on the beach of their public execution. Are we going to even watch the very shot of the condemned, tragic prelude of some further atrocities? (Viewed in English 1h41 version.)

Okay...this sequel does have more of the same graphic violence and gore as the first one...and all but 1 scene is real, not faked, but still as a connoisseur of this type of thing, I didn't "enjoy" this one as much, and I use the term enjoy loosely. These things are not enjoyable viewing, but more of curiosity pieces, and as that I found the first one to be a lot better, even if several of the scenes in it were faked. Still, there is animal slaughter, a shootout, an execution by firing squad, some stunts gone awry, and a boxing match that ends in tradgedy, and alas, the filmmakers cashed in even more, as this is not the last entry in the "popular" series. "Fans" of gore and violence will still have plenty to look at in this one and marvel in the brutality.

Best (HAH!) of the series.

Most of this was real footage.

Accident scenes from the autobahn.

Avalanche deaths.

Johnny Owens' last fight.

Only the cop shootout at the drugstore seemed fake. Too many camera angles and too much OTT acting to pass off as real.

Digging the bodies out of the avalanche was tough to see because most of the faces of the dead were easy to see.

The fire at the German nursing home will NOT be easy to stomach.

And the autobahn's traffic deaths were also a little heart rending.

My one question; Did 'Francis B. Gross' really make that much money off the first film that he could afford expensive boots, a new motorcycle, and to drink tequila in Mexico?

Since death is something that we all have to face at some point, it's no surprise a lot of people have a morbid fascination with the subject, or that 'documentaries' such as this exist (or, indeed, websites that trade in grisly real-life imagery). For many it's about confronting reality, others will be testing the limits of what they can handle, and there'll no doubt be those that find the whole thing funny, and something to boast about having seen to friends. Whatever your reason for watching, there's no denying that Faces of Death II contains some very disturbing scenes, and that the film should be approached with caution.

The first FOD film was a mix of fake footage and real-life horrors, but part II is almost all genuine, with only a drugstore robbery gone wrong being apparently staged (the hysterical female witness isn't very convincing): the film features Hindu cremations, an avalanche disaster, a fatal boxing match, unsuccessful daredevil stunts, and airplane crashes, the camera lingering on the victims. These are either accidents or acts of nature, and are comparatively innocuous. Scenes of war atrocities are harder to take, although these days such harrowing footage is often broadcast on TV in news reports and in documentaries, and unfortunately no longer has the impact it once had. For me, the real 'punch to the gut' is the animal cruelty, specifically the brutal slaughter of dolphins, made all the more difficult to stomach after the narrator, Dr. Francis B. Gröss (Michael Carr), talks at length about the intelligence of the species. Sometimes, the human race really sucks (I guess that's the main message to be gleaned from this film).

Other abhorrent content presented for your entertainment includes a tribe of cannibals with leprosy, and a mass execution by firing squad. Don't say you haven't been warned.

4/10: it's worth seeing if only for the jet-propelled car stunt: did they really think that was going to work?

Not much better than the 1st one, although there were several scenes of dare-devil stunts gone bad. Those are neat. Especially the rocket powered Lincoln Continental. (You just have to see it) I guess a good point to the movie is that not everybody dies. In some of the aforementioned stunt scenes, the drivers just get hurt. Whoooopeeee !!!!!!