Faces of Death: The Millennium
Review by Nick Peron
Not too long ago I had wrote an article wherein I talked about shocking movies that people refuse to watch because of the content as opposed to the context, (aka cinematic ignorance.) One of the films I selected for that article was the original Faces of Death
Following the original Faces of Death were a series of sequels, I believe after the third or fourth film they stopped using original footage and the remainder of the official Faces of Death franchise were simply reused footage with the odd new slip tossed in to spice things up a little. I highly doubt the original Faces of Death was the first film of it's kind, but it's the one that has achieved cult status, and is commonly associated with it's copy cats and imitations.
Which brings us to this little pile of crap: Faces of Death: The Millennium.
The original FOD was a rich tapestry of excellent commentary, as well as a contextual and purposeful juxtaposition of clips. It had a story. A beginning a middle and an end. It made people see death up close (all right, to be honest, sometimes it was faked, but still) and get personal with it. It painted a wonderful portrait of how death is everywhere in our lives. It can be natural, it could be accidental, it could be tragic, or it could be the result of human cruelty. It showed you some shocking shit, but it did it in a way that was not gratuitous, and in short, it was entertaining.
Which is not what I can say about Faces of Death: The Millennium.
Let me back pedal for a moment and discuss what I mentioned before: The imitators. Like I said, when the original Faces of Death became a cult phenomenon, shlocky filmmakers everywhere were lining up to make their own films of a similar bent. However, when it came to focusing on medium or message, it was always the medium that these hacks would focus on. Why? Because the viewing audiences that make these films popular would want to see more and more violent acts caught on film. They wanted to see real death. Most times, a lot of fakery was done to pull this off (a lot of times very convincingly) but there would be some real life footage of people dying in horrible ways. Go out there and lurk through the various death-film message boards and you will see on common theme: The people who want to regularly watch films of this nature want to do so because they want to see real and graphic depictions of death. The original purpose of Faces of Death appears to be lost on these people, as all they want to see is gratuitous death.
To give you an analogue you could perhaps understand better, I provide you with this: Picture people who would totally get off on the movie 9 1/2 Weeks
For the death aficionados, seeing images of real life death has gotten so much easier. No longer does one have to scour the back corners of horror movie conventions trying to find a bootleg VHS tape with this material. One need only log onto the internet. With the advent of the internet, file sharing, and easy access to technology that can make filming something and posting it online, the death-fetish video selection has exploded. Even before there were cell phones with cameras built in, all you needed to do was hop onto any old file sharing program and type in "faces of death" and you would get literally hours of violent footage.
The online DVD market is saturated with this material as well. With the ability of slapping together a DVD costing no more than a few dollars, putting together a DVD chocked full of images of death is easy to do. Heck the company that releases Faces of Death: The Millennium has four or five different sections on it's website dedicated to shocking and offensive material that is "banned" in America (Which is a misnomer, it's likely banned from American television based on FCC guidelines, as opposed to being banned from viewing within the US.)
Then there's the death website's. The most popular ones being Rotten.com and Ogrish.com. Ogrish is long gone, and I don't really think Rotten gets many updates these days. I'd recommend showing the former to anyone who thinks that 2Pac is still alive.
All this material to cater a demographic that just wants to see image after image of death. I am by no means part of this demographic, but because I am human by nature (and I have a strong stomach) I am often curious and have embellished that curiosity. When there was media outrage of Americans being beheaded in the Middle East, and the videos of said acts were proliferated all over the internet, I was one of the people who would flock to check it out out of morbid curiosity. While most people probably went looking at it to get a refill of Patriotic Indignation (LOOK WUT THEY DO TO AMERICA! TO FREEDUMB!) I was merely fascinated by the act itself. The moral and religious conviction of the assassins, and the last moments of a persons pleading life. These are not things I see everyday (nor would I want too.) These are the kind of horrors, and dramatic situations that filmmakers try and imitate but can never truly come even close to depicting in fiction. It's also tragedy. There's a person who met a very horrible, and very public end and he has a family and friends and they probably have all seen this just as much as I have. But their need is either to deny -- that perhaps watching it defiantly, thinking -- no -- this person I love is not dead, they did not die this way. But more likely to face the reality, and try to accept it. Best of luck.
Which brings me back to Faces of Death: The Millennium. Which so far as I can tell is in no way, shape, or form related to the Faces of Death franchise. It uses the logo, and I think that's the point -- they are cashing in on the imagery. That should have been my first warning sign. The other is that subsequent releases by this same company are titled Facez of Death 2000
That being said, Faces of Death: The Millennium, is the opposite of its name sake, so much so that it's barely watchable. It's dull, boring and absolutely asinine in its execution, and it does NOT help that they use the Faces of Death name -- because, one is going to associate it with the previous films of the same title.
Where the original film provided a personal insight and thoughts about the subject of death, this pathetic excuse of a "film" features clip after clip of scenes of death with no context what-so-ever. They're horrible, there's no commentary, no explanation of what we're looking at or why, and often the film quality is so bad you often have to wonder what the hell it is you're looking at. Because the clips are in such poor condition, and the audio levels are inconsistent. Some parts you have to crank up the volume and other times you have to turn it down. The other thing that doesn't help is the odd times they actually put in a music track. The music audio is often so loud that its sound is distorted you're better off muting it.
The other thing is that the film uses a lot of clips of news footage from other countries. Well, that's all fine and dandy, but what’s with the lack of subtitles? That's great. So when you're showing me a clip of a Spanish news reporter covering a situation where a man is threatening to jump to his death, would it hurt to put some subtitles in there? Because, hi, I'm the movie viewer, I'd like to know what's going on. Why is the guy up there? Do the reporters know? What is the guy threatening to jump trying to say? If I can't understand what's going on, how am I supposed to care about the people or the situation?
But see, this is the problem: I'm not watching this to just watch "mindless" death; I'm watching it like it's a movie. One could say, well Nick, these are clips of people dying, that's all you need to know. This would be fine, if that’s how this film billed itself. But it did not. As I said, it literally rips off the FOD logo and the back of the video box asks some pertinent questions, to quote it directly:
"THE NEW MILLENNIUM IS HERE
WE ARE STILL KILLING EACH OTHER, WHY?
TAKE A SHOCKING LOOK AT THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN.
YOU ARE NOT SAFE
WHAT CAN YOU DO TO STOP THIS MADNESS?
CHANGE.
IT IS PROBABLY TOO LATE FOR THE DEMONS TO CHANGE, BUT YOU CAN PROTECT YOURSELF FROM THEM, HOW?
SIMPLE - SAY NO TO THE DEVIL, DONT KILL ANYONE! IF YOU DO SO, YOU MIGHT END UP IN OUR NEXT FILM!
TO ALL OF THOSE KILLERS WATCHING THIS FILM FOR IDEAS, THEY'RE ALREADY DEAD - THEY JUST DONT KNOW IT YET! "
The back of the box suggests that it's asking pertinent questions: It bills itself as "The Millennium Edition" and makes it a point to question why human beings are so violent and why we kill each other. "Stop the killing!" it demands.
Well first of all, you don't offer any arguments *outside* of what you write on the video box. Your assertion is to stop killing people, yet you show clips of people who have died of natural causes, committed suicide, and accidents on top of people killing people. Stop the killing? Could it hurt to be more specific? Is your stance a complete abolition of death itself? Because if you're against violent murderous crime, then your argument and the subject you want your viewer to think about gets lost in the jumble of everything else you're cramming into your film.
Ultimately, the film is an incomprehensible jumble of clips, put together in a ship shod fashion with no rhyme or reason. Each clip is divided by a very obnoxious channel-fuzz cut shot to appear as though you're flipping through channels and each channel in between is static (pardon the pun, but that has been done to death.)
What properly punctuates the ineptitude is the inclusion of footage from the infamous "alien autopsy" video. Anyone remember this thing? It was supposedly an autopsy of a "real alien" that was recovered from the supposed UFO crash site in Roswell, New Mexico. When this thing first came out, all the paranormal shows at the time (“Sightings” being the most exploitive of this material) hopped on the bandwagon all thinking that this was definitive proof that intelligent life from outer space have come to Earth, and that the government is covering something up. The Fox Network even had a TV special
So yes... What the hell is footage from a fake alien autopsy doing in a movie that is supposed to be against human death? It certainly wasn't about killing, because if you follow the Roswell myth, the alien on the slab there died as the result of a UFO crash landing. What possible purpose do you have showing people doing an autopsy on an apparent alien? It fooled a lot of people, but hoax it was -- yet time and time again, there are people out there that still think this damn thing is real. Apparently one of them is the dumb ass that put this thing together.
Did they even review what they were putting together? If you're going to putting together a series of clips that are supposed to real life, you *might* want to check your sources. Just an idea.
The final criticism is that the majority of these clips all come from news station footage. Hey, that by itself can be fine -- a lot of the scenes from the original FOD used that same source for material. However, the problem is that the makers of THIS film relied almost entirely on newsreel footage. In the original FOD, they rounded things off by going out and filming specific scenes or approaching death in scenarios you will not find an Action News van on location to capture (IE: The scenes from the slaughter house in the original film) The other thing is that a news team more often than not arrives just *after* an event happens, or they are far enough away from the action so as not to get in the way of any police/fire/medical aid that is on the scene. In the original the makers would often recreate certain scenes, using similar locations and cameras and make-up special effects. Further, without actual footage of some of their subject matter, they relied on actors and special effects.
FOD: The Millennium however, uses mostly news footage and that's it. These shots are the raw source material, it's always in poor quality and they are cut badly. You're subject to footage of people running around screaming, with no voice over commentary explaining what it is you should be looking for. You're bored out of your mind because it's just people running around outside of a burning building. Then the camera pans up, and zooms in and you can vaguely see (due to poor lighting because they are filming at night) that there are people trapped on a balcony. After five grueling moments you vaguely can see someone falling to their death. More meandering, fire shots, and then oh hey, they show you a body on the ground.
Remember those clip shows "The Most Dangerous blah blah blah Caught on Tape?" where they'll show you the poor quality VHS camcorder recording of someone just barely escaping a bear attack, and they'll show the clip over and over and zooming in to the point where the already degraded video is incomprehensible? Well it's like that, but without the editing tricks. In fact, there is no editing. No editing. If you're going to shock me with horrifying images, not only are you actually going to have to SHOW me something that is clear and visible, but you might want to work on your pacing and editing. Why am I watching five to ten minutes of people shuffling around doing nothing? If I have to use my fast forward button, you fail. It's that simple.
Final word: Faces of Death: The Millennium should rename itself to Faces of Banality. Because it fails in every aspect, it's not interesting, it's not shocking, my grandfather with two artificial hips has faster pacing than this pile of drek. I would say even the death fetishists are going to be hard pressed to sit through this whole thing. So, to whoever made this film, you are a failure in the medium of video. I think the next time you want to put together a little death tape, how about you take some video editing courses.
