To celebrate the dvd and Blu-ray release of Faces of Death tomorrow, an official website has gone up at http://www.facesofdeath.com. There you’ll find plenty of information to pour over, whether it be scans of hysterical newspaper articles that blame Faces of Death for perhaps every horrific crime of the last three decades, or a list of crimes that were supposedly influenced by fans of this film.
You’re even invited to email them to share your story of when you first saw it. If you’re lucky, they’ll put it up on the site. My own first experience with the film was later than you’d expect- when I was perhaps 17 or 18 years old. I’d seen a bunch of ripoff videos before, that had covers depicting such infamous videos as the women getting hit by the train. But it wasn’t till I was watching a local video store in the Bronx for the owner (who went home early because he was hung over, letting a kid watch his store for him) that I found a dusty copy of it and threw it on the store’s tv. To show you what kind of a place it was, half of the people who came in knew what I was watching, and the other half didn’t care… being too concerned with checking out 8 porno movies at a time.
But I sat there in a video store full of horror and porno movies and I believed in what I was seeing, and it shook me like few other films. Like most people, later on I heard about how most of it was fake, how you couldn’t believe everything you saw but just the chance that some of it had been real was enough for me.
I doubt there’s many people who don’t have a story about watching Faces of Death for the first time, and if you don’t, isn’t it about time you got one?