Review of Faces of Death

I like to think that I've seen my share of versatile horror, cult and exploitation films by now (you're always welcome to browse through the user comments written under this ID) and I shamelessly admit that I'm very pro-violence in cinema! But I do think that you at least have to draw a line between reality and fiction. Even though most of the footage featuring in "Faces of Death" is proved to be fake, it still attempts to exploit the wrong type of message. The tagline just screams out "Banned in 46 countries" and the spoken intro tries to raise your curiosity even more. And what for? Only to make you feel like a voyeur when being exposed to a seemly endless series of human and animal death-struggles and cadavers. I wonder what exactly were the reasons for making this film…Nothing but easy money and cashing in on the popular trend of making the most repulsive movie possible, of course! Because, after all, "Faces of Death" only states the obvious: every living creature on this planet eventually dies! And no matter how pitiful it is to see a cow getting slaughtered for its meat or a seal for its fur, these are just ancient rites and explicitly showing it to horror fanatics definitely won't change a thing! It's even more saddening that this film also contains footage of wildlife rituals! Nature simply goes by the law of survival of the fittest and if you start to consider piranhas eating a snake as horror, you could also state that National Geographic is a horror channel! I despise this film and all its sequels for what it's trying to do. Death is a part of life and performing a detailed study on it is pretty uncalled for. The fact that Faces of Death is clumsy edited and meaningless makes it bad cinema. The fact that it's mostly phony footage while believed to be authentic just makes it pathetic.