Movies
Faces of Death: 30th Anniversary Edition
“Not for the faint of heart, or specifically for those who love animals. FACES OF DEATH might not be as outrageous as you remember it was all those many years ago, on that late summer night, cramped with your friends in front of the soft ozone glow of the television…”
Try to picture this for a moment. It’s a Friday night the summer after you’re 6th grade year. You’ve gathered on a hot and humid June evening at the house of one of your best friends. It’s past midnight and the parents have drifted off to a peaceful night’s rest, blissfully unaware of the terrors that await their youthful charges. It’s about this time that your buddy brings out the black plastic clamshell case containing a movie that his older brother rented at the local mom and pop video shop. You, along with a half dozen of your prepubescent friends, gather around the old RCA television and pop the dirty VHS tape into the Quasar VCR. When the film finally begins, the 6 of you bearing witness to the viscera on display are just the latest in a long series of indoctrinates who have stared horrifically into the bloody eyes of the FACES OF DEATH.
FACES OF DEATH was a rite of passage for pack-mentality preteen boys. It’s something so taboo that watching it ranks right up there with stumbling onto your dad’s secret cache of Hustler Magazines. In many ways FACES OF DEATH is even more elusive than the glossy stock pages of Larry Flynt’s monthly girly rag. After all, the coverbox of FACES OF DEATH proclaims that the film has been banned in 43 countries. Hell, by 1988, even the U.S. Supreme Court had validated Flynt’s right to free speech, but I’ll be damned if you could go into Blockbuster Video 10-years later and rent a copy of FACES OF DEATH. It was like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack.
In reality, FACES OF DEATH is the expectation that proves America’s most notorious unspoken entertainment rule. Puritanically speaking it’s always been inferred that we, as a society, would rather seen a pair of blown out brains than a pair of naked breasts. Parents have no problems purchasing their 12-year old children fifty dollar copies of Grand Theft Auto or Manhunt 2, but would shudder in unspeaking, unmentionable, terror if a certain pop star’s bejeweled nipple were accidently exposed during, say, a live sporting event. Sex sells, but only to those of age. Violence it appears is free for anyone to enjoy. FACES OF DEATH lives to circumvent that logic. No one rented FACES OF DEATH!
The original shockumentary, FACES OF DEATH is the next logical progression in a series of films that began in 1962 with the release of MONDO CANE. And while by today’s standards and practices the events of MONDO CANE would make for about as shocking as an episode of SURVIVOR, FACES OF DEATH is more like a PeTA protesters worst nightmare. Culling together stock footage of fur seals being clubbed, African cows begin bled out and headless chickens in the spasmodic throws of death is one thing, but “FACES” rather insidiously and ingeniously inserts staged footage of Middle Eastern restaurant patrons eating monkey brains and cannibal cults eviscerating corpses for the camera’s unflinching and exacting eye. Mish mashed together the old and the new, the real and the unreal create a hodgepodge of absolute truth that is telegraphed to the viewer as utter fact, disseminated by the principle that “the camera never lies” or that “seeing is believing”.
With the 30th anniversary DVD release of FACES OF DEATH all the fictions will have their facts revealed and the things that you swore were real will be proven to be anything but. It might be considered something of a let down, the unmasking of the specter that haunts this film. But, considering how poorly the film has aged over the past 30 years, considering the totality of offences that could be downloaded in a moments notice on a dozen or more free internet sites at any hour of the day, in any library or coffee shop, it just seems like the time is right for the filmmakers behind this legendary cult classic to come clean.
Keeping in mind those thoughts, the obvious reason to feast your eyes (or rather, your ears) on FACES OF DEATH one more time is to indulge in the audio commentary track. Director Conan LeCilaire is here to tell you many things you already know, or at least suspected. And, perhaps, a time or two, surprise you by what you didn’t know. The rest of the disc is padded out with a featurette on Special Effects creators Allan A. Apone and Douglas J. White as well as film editor Glenn Turner. What is amazing about these interviews is not the contributions each made to the illegitimacy of the purported “real’ footage, but the fact that they managed to avoid talking about it for so very long. Instead, many allowed friends and colleagues to continue to contend that staged events were absolutely real—despite knowing full well that the proceedings they were discussing were inarguably false. It’s fascinating to watch the giddiness of these filmmakers as they finally give up their long-kept secrets.
Not for the faint of heart, or specifically for those who love animals. FACES OF DEATH might not be as outrageous as you remember it was all those many years ago, on that late summer night, cramped with your friends in front of the soft ozone glow of the television. Watching the DVD tonight will surly not provoke tomorrow’s fervent debate around an office water cooler in the way that it once commanded across a crowded lunchroom. Still, the film does stand tall as a none-to-subtle reminder that once upon a time, before the rampant proliferation of the internet, before the tragic desensitization we’ve suffered at the hands of reality television, there was something truly shocking in the world. A time when only the bravest of 12-year old boys were willing to look into the FACES OF DEATH.
The problem with filming sequels back-to-back is that, unless you can afford expensive reshoots, there’s no easy way to adjust course in between movies if fans react badly to where the story is headed. That’s why it’s important to have a complete narrative thought out well in advance lest you accidentally kill a budding franchise.
However, this isn’t always the case. Every once in a while, it seems like the cinema gods smile upon certain chaotic productions and gift moviegoers with complete franchises that feel like more than the sum of their hastily produced parts. Ted Nicolaou’s Bloodlust: Subspecies III is precisely one of these miraculous pictures, with the raw talents of the artists involved (as well as the continued support from Romania) turning the feature into an effective conclusion for a series that kind of made things up as the filmmakers went along.
That’s why I’d like to invite my fellow readers to join me on this third part of our journey through the Subspecies franchise as we look into Bloodlust and talk about how it remains a surprisingly satisfying finale to the original trilogy.
A Trilogy Planned on the Fly
Released only a year after Bloodstone found plenty of success in rental stores and mail-in VHS catalogues worldwide, 1994’s Bloodlust was produced at the same time as its predecessor in (mostly) the same locations and with the same team. This means that the movie benefited from all the same upgrades as Bloodstone, with the crew now being more experienced with the ins and outs of surviving a low-budget Romanian production and the cast really settling into their characters.
At this point, everything from location scouting to the makeup process had been streamlined, with Wayne Toth and Norman Cabrera, the main duo behind special effects, even switching out time-consuming prosthetics for latex gloves in order to speed up Anders Hove’s monstrous transformation. The titular “subspecies” demons were also once again relegated to a mere cameo appearance due to the laborious puppetry required to bring them to life.
The only real hiccup came from the fact that actress Denice Duff had replaced the first film’s Michelle (Laura Mae Tate) and was immediately expected to portray the character as both an innocent victim in part II and as a secondary villain in part III. According to behind-the-scenes interviews, the hectic production schedule that blended two different movies meant that Duff would often find herself having to alternate between two incredibly different versions of Michelle during the same shooting day – though it’s obvious that she’s having more fun with Bloodlust’s more traditionally vampiric version of her character.
In the finished film, we pick things up immediately where the previous entry left off as Rebecca (Melanie Shatner) is forced to leave her vampire sister Michelle (Duff) behind in the dungeons of Castle Vladislav due to the rising sun. This allows Mummy (Pamela Gordon) to use Michelle’s blood to revive the vicious Radu (Hove) so that he may continue his quest for the coveted Bloodstone – a magical artifact that perpetually drips the Blood of Saints.
Meanwhile, the dreamy US embassy agent Mel (Kevin Blair) agrees to help Rebecca plan a rescue mission, though they’re unaware that Radu has become infatuated with Michelle during his attempts to guide her growing bloodlust. This all culminates in a climactic confrontation meant to tie up all of the series’ loose ends in one of Full Moon Pictures’ most ambitious productions.
The Evolution of Radu
Like its predecessor, Bloodlust: Subspecies III was also warmly received by fans who argued that the series was an even bigger success than Full Moon’s other major horror franchise, Puppet Master. This praise wasn’t unanimous, however, as 1994 had seen the rise of a more modern breed of sexy vampire popularized by Anne Rice, with old-school Nosferatu like Radu being viewed as obsolete when compared to the likes of Lestat and Gary Oldman’s take on Dracula.
In a way, one might argue that Nicolaou’s film is something of a swan song for the classic vampire story, as Bloodlust combines all of the traditional elements we tend to associate with these tales into a single tragic yarn that ties a neat little bow on Radu’s story as well as the old-fashioned monster movies that he represents. The finale remains shocking despite the fact that this is the third time we see Radu get brutally killed onscreen, with the brief tease that he may one day return feeling more like a nod towards the nature of evil rather than sequel bait.
The film dabbles a bit in gothic romance and even explores the inherent power fantasy behind transforming into an immortal creature of the night, but the filmmakers never lose sight of Radu as a demonic force even when he’s willing to betray his beloved Mummy for Michelle’s sake. In fact, his twisted “love” for his fledgling makes him even creepier as we get the feeling that his passion comes from a dark and disturbing place.
Anders Hove is at his absolute best in this film, with the effects department boosting his moments of what the younger generation would call “aura farming” whenever Radu emerges from shadows like a 90s version of Count Orlok. There are even a couple of surprisingly effective jump-scares here, which is why I’d argue that Bloodlust cements Radu as one of the most memorable cinematic vampires of all time despite his humble origins.
Subspecies Saves Its Best For Last
Nicolaou and Vlad Panescu also saved the best for “last” (more on that in a bit) regarding the film’s visuals, with the cinematography and overall atmosphere of Bloodlust absolutely surpassing what we saw in the previous films. Everything feels appropriately climactic this time around (including the wonderful soundtrack that was co-composed alongside an authentic Romanian orchestra), and I appreciate how this is the fastest-paced entry in the trilogy since the film doesn’t need to waste time setting anything up.
Bloodlust still suffers from some of the same low-budget blemishes as its predecessors, but there’s so much creative passion here that no amount of wonky effects work or stilted dialogue can get in the way of appreciating the flick’s gothic grandeur. That’s why it’s not surprising that the movie’s definitive(-ish) ending would later be retconned as fans begged for more Radu.
Of course, the next entry in this series would be a different kind of vampiric endeavor altogether, with the filmmakers attempting to engage with the same trends that ultimately killed Radu and his antiquated kin. That, however, is a story for another time. For now, I’ll merely insist that Bloodlust: Subspecies III remains a highlight of Full Moon’s expansive catalogue and is definitely worth seeking out today.
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