Back when VHS was still working its way into the mainstream and I was only a few years away from daily nap time, if you saw two kids on the playground whispering there's a good chance they were talking about Faces of Death. Word on the jungle gym was that there was a tape out there somewhere that showed people actually dying. No special effects, just real ending. That was of course, a load of crap.
Faces of Death was as fake as any other movie, but it sure fooled a lot of elementary school kids. Kids are where the movies found success, it became something of a cult hit after its release in 1978, and subsequent installments circulated amongst teens and pre-teens hiding out in their parent's basements.
The theme of each Faces of Death movie was simply to show gruesome ways in which people and animals could be killed, using the gonzo format now more happily applied to girls going wild. Basically it was all about gore, and audience appetite for that is as great as ever. So I guess it makes a weird sort of sense that someone is about to resurrect the whole Faces of Death thing. Variety says that Focus Features' genre division Rogue Pictures is planning to redo the Faces of Death series with J.T. Petty attached to direct.
It's a simple, cheap way to milk more cash out of the dumb kids who support crap like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes, insert your blood n' guts laden horror franchise here. Only now they'll have to make the movies more explicit if they want to grab modern audiences. I'm sure Rogue will find a way to do it. It's not like they'll have to worry about ratings problems. Snuff films are perfectly acceptable in the US, as long as there's no sex in them. Kill all the hookers you want, but for christ's sake don't help them earn a living!
The only question here is whether Rogue will be able to generate the same underground hype that the originals had. Now it's been done, you can't really manufacture that kind of cult credibility. They'd better hope for a big opening weekend.
