Chalk up a winner for another Shudder exclusive horror movie. They were right to acquire this movie. Faces of Death is not a remake of the original film from 1978, like I had first thought it would be. I’ve never watched it myself but had Googled it prior to going into this one. It’s a pretty gory and disturbing film, which I’m sure has a cult following because of it. The Faces of Death movie released on Shudder is something completely different. It obviously has its flaws, but I was quite surprised at how much I enjoyed it.

The major theme of the movie that gets explored is how humans are just attracted to death. That and, obviously, how the Internet has exploded in content created by users that can range from showing a cute animal to something absolutely barbaric and gruesome, all for the thrill of getting noticed. It’s a topic I’m sure I can go on and on about, but that’s for another time. Here, we stumble upon Margot, who has the ultra-fun and thrilling job of sitting in front of a computer to either allow or censure user-uploaded videos on a video streaming platform that’s eerily similar to Kick. She stumbles upon a disturbing video of what looks to be a live execution, but her boss doesn’t seem to care when she raises the issue. Slowly, she learns that those deaths are similar in style to a documentary-style film called none other than Faces of Death, the one from 1978. Apparently there’s a sicko out there committing these murders, and Margot feels like she has to do something about it because of her own troubled past.

I felt Dacre Montgomery did an excellent job playing Arthur Spevak. Dude is born to play these types of psychopath roles in movies. His role is typical and cliché when it comes to disturbed psycho killers being portrayed in movies such as these, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting to watch when done correctly. I did wish that they spent a bit more time going over his character, though. We do find out a bit about his motivations for creating these execution-type videos, but I felt that they could have gone more in-depth on this, if just a tad bit more. The ending struggle session between Margot and Arthur was also pretty intense. All in all, this was a pretty enjoyable movie for a Shudder exclusive.