Review #560: 'Faces of Death II' (1981)

After the huge success of the first Faces of Death film in 1978, John Alan Schwartz wasn't going to turn down the opportunity to capitalise on audience's unquenchable thirst for death and returned to the 'director's' chair in 1981 to make another collection of grisly events. Michael Carr returns once again as our host Dr. Francis B. Gross, this time sporting a shirt and jeans combination, rather than his doctor's jacket (he was fooling nobody). We have more animal slaughter, decomposing bodies, shoot-outs and executions, as well as a large focus on stunt accidents, a fatal boxing match, animal experimentation, and the aftermath of an avalanche.

While the first entry was mainly a collection of badly-filmed and thoroughly unconvincing staged scenes, the sequel has much more real footage, and only the police shoot-out scene, where director Schwartz plays one of the criminals and proves himself to be as useless at acting as he is at directing, is seemingly faked. While the staged scenes was the main factor I criticised from the first film, the distinct lack of them takes the (should I say it?) charm out of the film. The clips are simply thrown in together, lacking the first's narrative structure, taking whatever 'meaning' the FOD series tries to convince us it has and coming across as simply low-rent exploitation.

One of the longest scenes focuses on the boxing match between Welsh Bantamweight boxer Johnny Owen being knocked into a coma by Mexican champion Lupe Pintor. Gross' narration fails to really acknowledge Owen as anything other than a face of death, but knowing that Owen's statue stands in Merthyr Tydfil not far from where I live where he is fondly remembered (the statue was unveiled by Pintor), it hammers home how bad taste this film really is. So, certainly not as 'good' (I've never used so many inverted commas) as the first, which at least provided some unintentional laughs, but this series will still remain a curiosity to me, and will no doubt reluctantly seek out the rest of the series in time.


Directed by: John Alan Schwartz
Starring: Michael Carr
Country: USA

Rating: *

Tom Gillespie