(Note: I got no pleasure out of watching this whatsoever.)How do I review something like this? Is it a movie, a documentary, or both? Essentially, I learned that it was all constructed around stock footage. You have the worst stuff, which to me are all the medical dissections and the brutal slaughterhouse conditions (all real). Then you have the "re-creations," which were all shot from scratch. The alligator attack, the monkey head scene, the police shootout, capital punishment, the cult sacrifice, the beheading, the bear attack--all FAKE. What's left are brief glimpses of death--the beginning of an assassination or a suicide (which then quickly cuts away), the aftermath of tragic fatalities, bits of wreckage--but all the close-up gory details (body parts and so forth) are all fabricated. It's unbelievable to me that a movie as notorious as this, which has remained so taboo for so many years, is actually so tame and mostly a hoax.
So how do I review it? Well, as a "documentary" about death (narrated by the fictitious "Dr. Gröss"), it succeeds in exploring something our culture tends to shun and hide away and puts it out in the open, and for that I applaud it. However, its attempts to be misleading and the satisfaction it gets out of exploiting its audience is rather despicable and unforgivable (then again, did I really want to see the raw footage?). It's not as bad as my imagination led me to believe it would be, but then again, it's nothing anyone should ever have to subject themselves to.
2 facing my fears out of 5
No comments:
Post a Comment