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.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Faces of Death 2 (1981) C-85 min. D: John Alan Schwartz. Hosted by Michael Carr. Having not seen the original FACES OF DEATH or any of the sequels, it allowed me to keep an open mind when viewing this. Carr plays Dr. Francis B. Gross, who presents in documentary style the various aspects of death, trying to come across as informative and scientific but we as the viewers all know it's just an excuse to show grisly images & footage of monkeys on drugs, dolphin slaughters, public executions, deadly stunts, leprosy, autopsies, funerals, corpses, etc. Cheesy, yet adequately disturbing lacks in the technical aspects (most footage is horrible quality and the late 70s-early 80s production values border on pathetically lame) but this kind of film just aims to shock and repel. The entire FACES OF DEATH series has a big cult following, like any film of this nature. All in all, adequate for what it intends to do. RATING: 5 out of 10.

Comments based on the US version, which is missing the footage of the attempted assassination of Reagan. . Not as good as the first one, but still worthwhile. The first movie was a mock documentary about death and the ways that various different cultures around the world and throughout time have dealt with, and prepared for, death. This one is more focused on "death defiance": Evil Kenevil type of stunt men, sports-related injuries and deaths, bomb defusers, etc. Some of the footage is good, and some of it is just overlong. The boxer who died as a result of the brain injury he sustained in a fight was good, but needed to be edited down to 2 or 3 minutes, not the nearly 10 minute scene that it is. That's really the biggest problem with this movie: it's overlong, and it puts its two longest, least interesting scenes at the very end: a ten minute scene about whale poachers, and another lengthy scene involving a public execution in the Ivory Coast (Cote D'Ivoire), which drags on for nearly the last 15 minutes of the movie, even longer than that in the European version. That scene never climaxes, it just changes to slow motion, drags on during the end credits, and then that's it- the film ends. Poor attempts at camp humour are detrimental also, such as puzzling intro footage of Dr. Gross playing with a bunny rabbit and searching for Easter eggs, leading to slaughterhouse footage, while people eating chicken at the dinner table concludes the segment.

Okay...this sequel does have more of the same graphic violence and gore as the first one...and all but 1 scene is real, not faked, but still as a connoisseur of this type of thing, I didn't "enjoy" this one as much, and I use the term enjoy loosely. These things are not enjoyable viewing, but more of curiosity pieces, and as that I found the first one to be a lot better, even if several of the scenes in it were faked. Still, there is animal slaughter, a shootout, an execution by firing squad, some stunts gone awry, and a boxing match that ends in tradgedy, and alas, the filmmakers cashed in even more, as this is not the last entry in the "popular" series. "Fans" of gore and violence will still have plenty to look at in this one and marvel in the brutality.