Reviews
‘Faces of Death’ (2026) Review: A Mostly Successful Mondo Revival
Faces of Death was staring down a loaded barrel since conception. In a cycle of the internet that feels more tumultuous and eye-bleach worthy than the LiveLeak dark ages, and in a post-Censor, and post-Red Rooms horror landscape, the 2026 remake finds itself playing against a stacked deck; both in trying to shock audiences, and also in bringing a fresh new perspective to the evergreen topic of violent media and censorship. While the feature doesn’t reach cinematic par excellence, it does offer a gory and bleak tale that feels both as real and as unbelievably violent as the 1978 film it’s working off of.
An Original Story That Skewers the Remake Angle
Margot’s (Barbie Ferreira) days in a cubicle are spent as a content moderator for the social media app Kino. Her shifts are filled with an odd sort of monotony, stretches of bog-standard dangerous content broken up by the system shock of unfiltered ultraviolence and hypersexual slices of the internet. She tries to maintain sanity scouring through thousands of reported videos, all the while adhering to the company’s own dubious standards.
But when she stumbles across a series of disturbing snuff films being uploaded to the platform, a pattern begins to emerge connecting to multiple disappearances. When Margot discovers the creator Arthur (Dacre Montgomery) is emulating the 1978 mondo film Faces of Death as he kills, a game of cat and mouse begins between the two, putting them on a mortal collision course as the internet watches.
It’s easy to appreciate Daniel Goldhaber’s and Isa Mazzei’s meta-commentary approach to continuing the series that sickened audiences in the 70s and 80s. Skewering the more predictable remake angle in favor of an original story that simply uses its predecessor as fuel for the social commentary fire feels like the best possible outcome. It’s especially evident in the shift from detached documentary to stylized movie. It has an evocatively muted color grading and lighting setup, a cinematography that embodies desensitizing, mundane evil, and its uniquely modern corporate environs perfectly. It’s clever in a way that even the droll musings of Francis B. Gröss couldn’t capture.
A Story About Profitable Demise in The Age of Digital Death
There is a delightful irony in a film that faked most of its footage being reincarnated into a fable about real life suffering and bloodshed made algorithmically profitable. Doubly ironic since the Faces films inevitably became little more than vomit inducing highlight reels, cut to squeeze some quick cash out of its notoriety.
Whereas the original film liked to vaguely wax poetic about the spiritual nature of humankind destroying itself and cyclical violence while it tried to make you gag, Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei mince no words with what they want to say here. At its core, Faces of Death (2026) is a story about the corporatization of digital death. There’s a paper trail to be followed when it comes to people becoming completely desensitized to seeing their fellow humans die, and it’s all about the money; only the most depraved of fools could think it’s an artistic endeavor. It’s in this moral crucible that we find our protagonist Margot, and our especially depraved antagonist, Arthur.
Ferreira’s Driven Final Girl Debut, Montgomery’s Best Performance to Date
Margot is a genuinely compelling character whose story hooks you from the jump. She feels extremely real despite the somewhat over-the-top circumstances that drive her to keep searching for the truth. She’s a refreshingly driven final girl, with Ferreira depicting a character consumed by an obsession with justice, filled to the brim with fidgety energy. The main flaw in the performance is Ferreira’s overreliance as an actress on big bursts of emotion, specifically anger. While it’s satisfying initially as the only person advocating for humanity, it starts to teeter towards the absurd by the end of the film as she chews the scenery with her wrath.
Ferreira plays opposite Dacre Montgomery in what is certainly his best performance to date. It’s not a complicated or particularly original character, suffering from the same Buffalo Bill Syndrome that every movie serial killer has been a victim of since the late 90s. But his mannerisms and grinning nastiness as Arthur, his off-putting focus on the art of killing, more than make up for it as he skulks around and plays the creep with borderline tactical efficiency.
Their inevitable clash in the third act pays off a string of impressive and nauseating sequences where Dacre’s character kills his victims in loose reenactments of some of 1978’s more notorious sequences. The culmination is one of the best horror movie fights on screen in a while, and it’s certain not to disappoint for those who came to watch the sanguine fireworks the Faces of Death series is best known for.
A Gaunt Supporting Cast and Stumbling Final Act Hinders Faces of Death
All that being said, the two leads are about all we get in the way of interesting performances. The rest of the supporting cast gets very little to do, with the victims and Margot’s roommate feeling like the worst casualties of all. That’s not even touching on the sore thumb that is Charli XCX’s character, whose dialogue and delivery are about as painful as Arthur’s methods of torture.
And as much as I like that third act meeting between final girl and killer, the finale’s disjointed construction is undoubtedly the Achilles’ heel of the film’s composition. While the first act is as compelling as can be, and its second genuinely nerve wracking throughout, the third act is markedly slower and stumbles more than a few times. There’s a false climax that results in the action hiccupping harshly, an odd beat of filler killing the engines on what felt like an impeccably paced and breakneck story up to that point.
Why Faces of Death (2026) Feels More Relevant and Terrifying Than Ever
All in all, Faces of Death (2026) manages to reinvigorate its namesake, and gives it a sense of modernized purpose that the horror franchise lacked before. What results is a film that feels as socially relevant as it is frightening. And for those uninterested in moral discussions of soul sapping social media companies, it still serves up a feast of gruesome set pieces and stalking sequences to entertain the thrill-seekers in the audience.
I was browsing the Arrow Video table at Brooklyn Horror Film Festival in 2024, spending way too much money. (Nearly $400!) One film really caught my eye. Its cover was unassuming but spoke loudly: two red-lit people in space suits on the top left, while a (what seemed to be) missile silo took up the rest of the cover. The cover was enough to sell me, and I threw it in my car. Little did I know that The Andromeda Strain was going to be one of the most fascinating films I have ever watched. And the book was just as spectacular.
What is The Andromeda Strain About?
Piedmont, New Mexico, is quickly thrust into chaos when a government satellite crashes into the town of 68 people. Doctors Jeremy Stone (Arthur Hill), Charles Dutton (David Wayne), Mark Hull (James Olson), and Ruth Leavitt (Kate Reid) are activated to investigate this local extinction event. But they don’t find themselves inside a normal science lab; the four doctors are sent to Wildfire, a deep underground military base (D.U.M.B.). This 5-level-deep base is our nation’s frontline defense against this cataclysmic incident, but should it escape, then all hell would break loose.
Adapting Michael Crichton’s Novel
Based on the Michael Crichton novel of the same name, The Andromeda Strain is a wonderfully contained film that’s as pulse-pounding as it is fascinating. As someone who isn’t very smart, a film (and book) like this one makes me feel educated. Sci-Fi films find themselves constantly tiptoeing a tightrope of understanding. Hell, science is in its name. Should a writer make the science aspects too dumb, either no one will believe it, or people will be bored. If a writer makes it too smart, you alienate audiences like me, whose eyes quickly gloss over.
Nelson Gidding’s script, which is fairly accurate to Crichton’s novel, does an incredible job of bringing Crichton’s fascinating novel to life. Gidding trims out some fat where needed, turning this story into an incredibly lean two-hour 10-minute self-contained epic. With stylistic assistance from director Robert Wise, Gidding keeps the near-epistolary feel of the novel. But it’s the pacing and stylization of the film that bring it to a new level.
Robert Wise’s Direction and the Film’s Unique Sci-Fi Style
Robert Wise and cinematographer Richard H. Kline bring forced monotony in the most engaging way. I love how the decontamination chapters are handled in the novel, though it could be worrying to question how that could be transcribed over to film. But it’s how the decontamination scenes are handled that adds substance to the style. These scenes are slow, tiring, and should bring the pacing to a complete stop. At this point, we’ve seen what this satellite did to the town, and we’re amped to get more context. These scenes seem to go on and on, and it’s the tedium that comes with them that humanizes the entire process. I’m sure these doctors want to get to the heart of why they’re here, and as viewers, we’re forced alongside them to sit and wait for each second to tick by through the cleaning process on EACH level.
Most of the characters are fodder for dialogue and plot advancements, but it’s the characters of Dr. Hall and Dr. Leavitt who are the most complex. Dr. Hall is trusted with the key that would detonate a nuclear bomb inside this D.U.M.B., due to what is described as the odd-man hypothesis. (This basically means, should the crap really hit the fan, a single man with no children would have the least amount of issues making a tough decision in a life-or-death scenario.) And Dr. Leavitt’s character is maddeningly deep. She suffers from a medical issue that goes undisclosed–this is due to her deep love for her work, and she would not be able to do what she does based on this issue.
The Underground Base and Production Design
But what really sells me on this film is how it all takes place in a gorgeously constructed underground military base. The set design is beyond immaculate and well-crafted. It truly feels like an authentic underground base. And it’s fascinating that I stumbled on this film at the same time I had been doing deep research into Valiant Thor, Raven Rock, and the Greada Treaty. Though that is neither here nor there.
Why The Andromeda Strain Is Essential Sci-Fi Viewing
The Andromeda Strain is a grounded, but still incredibly smart, Sci-Fact film that brings light to an oft-not-spoken-about aspect of the United States Government. It excels at telling a brilliant, life-changing story while making it palatable for all audiences. This is a film that should be shown over the course of three Fridays in a lazy teacher’s science class. Action, anxiety, and fear abound in The Andromeda Strain. It’s a film that should be on any film viewer’s watchlist.
There are countless subgenres within subgenres for horror, and one that feels underutilized is workplace horror. Unless you’re one of the lucky few, most people wake up at some point during the day, go to work, and then come home. It’s one of the few things in life that’s nearly unavoidable. While there are countless real-life examples of workplace violence, seeing exaggerated forms of it in film can still be fun. When I pitched covering The Belko Experiment for this month, I actually thought I was pitching Joe Lynch’s Mayhem. I soon found out how incorrect I had been, but figured I’d go along with it anyway.
Mike Milch (John Gallagher Jr.) and 79 of his coworkers are locked inside the towering building they come to work in every day in Bogotá, Colombia. They’re given simple instructions: murder two coworkers within the next half hour. When they fail that task, coworkers’ heads start blowing up left and right. When they’re given the next task, kill 30 people in two hours, they take it…a little more seriously.
The Belko Experiment’s Brutal Premise Sets Up High Stakes
Written by James Gunn and directed by Wolf Creek creator Greg McLean, The Belko Experiment is a painfully by-the-numbers film that offers little more than a handful of entertaining kills. Its futile attempts at commentary regarding work/life balance or just how bad “faceless” upper management is fall so flat it’s comical. Nothing like multi-millionaire James Gunn telling me how awful it is to have to work a real job for a living. Great work. And its one-dimensional characters do little more than create a slight sigh of relief when they’re dispatched without regard.
A singular attempt at cleverness is broached from the beginning when we see a colony of ants in an ant farm on someone’s desk. Oh, look at that, these workers are nothing more than mindless ants! But any attempt at following that slightly clever idea is quickly thrown away. At one point, Barry Norris (Tony Goldwyn), the big boss in the office, attempts to group up who should and shouldn’t be killed; who has the most value outside of work. Gunn had the perfect opportunity to make Barry a deep and more sinister antagonist. If Barry had grouped people into sets from most to least profitable for the company, we would have something. It would show that Barry is a forward-thinking villain who is trying to suck up to the people who get paid even MORE than him!
Missed Opportunities for a Smarter Corporate Villain
I’ll do you one better. After all of that, what if the bad guys that Barry recruited to help him cull his subordinates realized they were just pawns in the game of Big Business? So then they attempt to repent by killing Barry in the hopes that they can find a common means of escape from this hell? Why is there zero attempt at making an interesting story other than this shitty, watered-down Battle Royale with people we don’t give a shit about? Instead of anything interesting, we’re just given a group of baddies who try to get into the security office’s gun safe. The only reason we’re slightly scared of the “bad guys” is because they’re bad guys.
The only slightly interesting performances we get are from David Dastmalchian and Adria Arjona, even if it might be a fluke. As someone who is a fan of Greg McLean and the Wolf Creek series, something just felt disconnected about nearly every aspect of The Belko Experiment. I’ve brought it up before that sometimes it’s okay to have a film that doesn’t tell a great story as long as the kills can carry some of the weight. But to say this film has a story is laughable, and that carries over to how flat this film looks.
Skip The Belko Experiment and Watch Mayhem Instead
It’s weird how sour this film left me. When I was watching it, I found myself grimacing at some of the kills. And I didn’t vehemently dislike it as much as this review would suggest. But as I sat there and thought longer, I just couldn’t wrap my head around what anyone sees in this. Mayhem is an all-around better film that tackles this same subject but in a much better way. So if you ever decide to sit down and watch The Belko Experiment, maybe go watch Mayhem on Shudder instead.
