In Shudder and IFC’s recent, surprisingly great update on Faces of Death, the characters talk about the original film with a contradictory combination of dismissal and awe. To them, it’s both “some old horror movie” and a dark talisman that, while it’s not quite supernatural, brings out the worst in everyone who watches it. It certainly inspires the film’s villain, played by Dacre Montgomery, who takes scenes that were faked for the original movie and redoes them “for real” — within the fictional world of this movie, of course. It’s all very meta.
It also serves as an effective advertisement for the original film. If a movie was so controversial that video-store clerks had to keep it under the counter, forcing the morbidly curious to ask for it by name, then surely it must be worth watching, right? Yes and no.
