FACES OF DEATH
****
Directed by Daniel Goldhaber.
Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery, Josie Totah.
Horror, US, 97 Minutes, Certificate 18.
Reviewed as part of Tubi FrightFest 2026
Released to own by Signature Entertainment on 7th September
It might feel that the bottom of the remake barrel is being scraped by the time we get to the sleazy mondo madness of the legendary FACES OF DEATH. One of those films that was infamous from the start with its mixture of documentary footage of animal slaughter, war atrocities and recreations of executions and assassinations , it only gathered notoriety as the years went on. Completely denied a UK release in the good old Video Nasty days, a certain amount of hearsay was employed into what the film actually was. Depending on who you spoke to it was an actual snuff film with a bit where people ate a live monkey's brain or it was all fake. With no internet to check out the facts we could only imagine what was going on until a pirate VHS found its way to you. Even these days when the film is totally accessible at the click of a button now, it still is a queasy watch, so how on Earth would you remake such a title? And why would you want to?
Enter director Daniel Goldhaber and co-writer Isa Mazzei. The duo behind the smart and entertaining CAM and HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE. Their smart contemporary storytelling style may seem ill-suited to the sleazy exploitation stylings of the blood soaked adventures in death narrated in a deadpan fashion by the totally made-up pathologist Francis B. Gröss, but they deliver an effortlessly entertaining slasher mixed up with an incisive takedown of social media platforms and big tech.
It is at Kino Moderation, where we meet Margo Romero, a young woman with her own social media issues, who moderates video content submitted to the site. Involuntarily doomscrolling through a mountain of clips entailing all sorts of socially unacceptable content, she becomes fascinated by a series of artfully staged executions that somehow seem too real. When her concerns are brushed aside to “give the people what they want”, Margo soon discovers that the killings are real, committed by a serial killer who, inspired by the original film, finds today's digital landscape the ideal place to indulge his homicidal urges and twisted agenda.
Ferreira makes for an appealing and more interesting hero than you would usually find in this genre. She is more than capably matched by Dacre Montgomery as Arthur Spevak, a seemingly mild mannered man whose homicidal manaia comes out in full force more and more as the film progresses to a showdown between him and Margo. World’s away in all aspects from his performance as Billy in STRANGER THINGS, his click obsessed serial killer here lends the film a 90’s serial killer thriller atmosphere as his fiendish and grisly plans come to fruition while touching on his tic driven mania.
We live now in an age where not only is the original FACES OF DEATH readily available, in high definition, but far more worse content can be found in seconds via a device we all now carry on our person. As a slasher film for this digital age this new FACES is far more interesting and entertaining than it had any right to be. Fans of the original film will take a certain delight and satisfaction in seeing some of the more notorious setpieces recreated here, with Gröss’s own original voiceover mixed in. Goldhaber and Mazzei launch from here a takedown of the brazen hypocrisy that video and social media platforms brazenly take part in while also providing a none too subtle dig at cynical audiences who mindlessly watch such content without batting an eyelid. At the same time the film more often than not slickly presents Spevak’s crime in such a lurid yet glossy manner that you cannot help but be grimly entertained by his horrifying crimes. It is a dichotomy that very slightly hinders the film in its takedown of how other such violent media is now cynically consumed on such a widespread basis. However, longtime fans and complete newcomers should find enough here to keep them distracted from their phone for its running time.
Iain MacLeod