If the word “Mondo” means little to you beyond the film merch company formerly owned by the Alamo Drafthouse, then you’ve probably been lucky enough to avoid the Faces of Death franchise, you sweet summer child. Mondo cinema was the name given to a subgenre of documentaries, spawned in the 1960s and assembled from the most disturbing and sickening clips, gussied up with some kind of pseudo-intellectual voice-over to cover their ghoulish intent. The most commercially successful and the nadir of the genre was 1978’s Faces of Death, a mix of actual newsreel footage and carefully staged gore filmed in faux vérité fashion. It was less a movie and more a dare. How much can you watch before puking or going, “Man, that’s so fake.”
The film spawned a series of sequels of decreasing value (if that’s possible) and now gains a meta-remake in Faces of Death, in which a bored cell phone vendor, Arthur (Dacre Montgomery, Stranger Things, Dead Man’s Wire) kidnaps influencers in the Jacksonville area and uses them to re-enact the fake kills from the original movie for real.
There’d been talk of this kind of openly fictional riff on the series since back in 2006, when director J.T. Petty was attached to the project after the success of his pseudo-documentary, S&Man. That film was set in the world of underground extreme horror tape traders, but two decades later everyone can be exposed to such material through social media, whether they want it or not. It’s the job of Margot (Barbie Ferreira, Euphoria, Bob Trevino Likes It) to stop the worst of the worst getting through: quite literally, as she’s a content moderator for social media watchdogsKino Moderation. When she starts finding Arthur’s scenes online, she has no idea about Faces of Death: Luckily, her queer artist roommate happens to have a copy on VHS that she can fast forward to watch the relevant gore and realize there’s a real killer on the loose…