Faces of Death/Fun Facts
From The Grindhouse Cinema Database
- In a February 2012 interview with the National Public Radio program "On the Media," the movie's creator, John Alan Schwartz, said that the scene that purports to show real tourists in Egypt killing a monkey and eating its brains was really filmed in a Moroccan restaurant in the US using Schwartz's friends as actors, foam mallets, a model monkey with a prosthetic breakaway head, a trick table, and cauliflower covered in theater blood for the brains.
- This film contains real stock footage of accidents, suicides, autopsies and animal killings. It also contains many deaths that have been proven as staged.
- Many actors and special makeup/effects crew have come forward to try to obtain credit for their work on this film. Most of these people were not in any union at the time of filming. This is the reasoning for the brief credits which helped make the film more realistic.
- Ranked #50 on Entertainment Weekly's "Top 50 Cult Films of All-Time"
- One sequence involves cryogenic patient Samuel Berkowitz, who was frozen in July 1978 and stored in northern California. The relatives who were funding the suspension began to lose interest and/or wherewithal, an offer was made to continue the suspension as a neuro (head-only) free of charge, but it was turned down. Instead in October 1983 they had Berkowitz thawed, submerged in formaldehyde, given a proper funeral and buried. No attempt was made specifically to preserve the brain.
- John Alan Schwartz came up with the electrocution scene by reading an article in Hustler Magazine on electrocution.
- In an interview, director John Alan Schwartz said that he played the leader of the flesh eating cult at the end of the film.
- The electrocution scene was faked in a loft of one of the filmmakers' friend's house. The foam from the mouth was toothpaste.
- The music heard during the slaughterhouse sequence early in the movie is "Anitra's Dance" from Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 by Edvard Grieg.