Faces da Morte III

These days, the Faces of Death movies are fairly redundant, the internet offering up way sicker sights than any VHS release of the '80s. That said, Faces of Death III was pretty pointless from the get go, the creators attempting to pass off badly staged footage as real-life horror. Anyone expecting a dose of extreme nastiness will be sorely disappointed by this lame threequel; part II was almost all genuine, but this one is 99% fake. The end credits state that 'certain scenes have been recreated'. You don't say!

The film's poorly acted scenes include the search for, and trial of, a serial killer, the court case involving grainy video footage of the killer raping and torturing a girl (the film doesn't explain who was holding the camera), drug traffickers shot at by police in the everglades, a parachutist eaten after landing in an alligator farm, a prisoner in El Salvador interrogated and tortured, a bomb disposal gone wrong, a suicide leap from a tall building, and a barracuda biting a diver in the face. The only real content is the obligatory animal slaughterhouse footage and some open heart surgery.

The first two films were suitably abhorrent: this one is also repellent, but only because it doesn't deliver what it promises. The raison d'etre of this kind of film is to show the viewer the harsh reality of life and death, so what's the point if virtually none of it is genuine?

1/10, with a very generous extra point for having an editor named Wayne Smegma II (his name's probably as fake as everything else, but it made me laugh).