If you are a person of a certain age and a person of a certain disposition, then you likely have memories of the 1978 film Faces of Death. It became quite the rage in my high school. This would have been the late 1980s or early 1990s, nearly a decade after the film came out. I’m thinking we must have learned about it due to one of the many sequels, or maybe when they hit the VHS rental market. There was only one place anywhere near me that rented it – Mega Movies. They had bought out an old Burger King, so it had a huge amount of floor space, and they filled it with all sorts of crazy movies. My love of oddball cinema and glorious B-movies in part came from Mega Movies.

For those of you who aren’t of a certain age or disposition, Faces of Death was a purported documentary in which a mad pathologist obsessed with death shows us a whole lot of supposedly real images of death. There is man getting eaten by an alligator, a SWAT team shooting a gunman down, accidents, suicides, and a death by electric chair. In truth, only some of the scenes were real; most of them were fake. But we thought it was real. And shocking. You gotta remember this was way before viral videos were a thing. These days you can see all sorts of very real death on the internet, but back then this was it. It was utterly fascinating and horrifying.

I haven’t thought of those films in years, so when a new Faces of Death film was announced (totally fictional, just sort of based on the idea of those old films), I wasn’t particularly interested. I haven’t thought of those old films in years because I have no interest in that type of thing anymore. The real world is full of enough real horror that I don’t need to seek it out on the Internet. But then there was a certain amount of buzz, and I wanted to watch a horror film before me and the wife went to see The Odyssey in theaters, so this was it.

The story is an interesting one, but this did not work for me at all.

Margot Romero (Barbie Ferreira) works for Kino, a TikTok-like company, as a content moderator. She sits in a cubicle all day, watching flagged videos and deciding whether they should be banned, allowed, or allowed with a content warning. Speed is the name of the game. She watches just a few seconds of the video and makes a determination. Interestingly, she allows a great deal more violent content than sexual. Pretty heavy violence gets an okay, but a woman giving instructions on how to put a condom on a cucumber gets banned.

One day she watches a strange video where a man surrounded by mannequins is decapitated. It looks real. But she decides it is a fake and allows it. The next day she sees a similar video where a man is electrocuted. Once again, he is surrounded by mannequins. This time she brings in her manager, but he brushes it off. It has to be a fake. And no, we can’t turn it into the cops because that might damage the company’s reputation.

When she sees a third video, she decides it is real. She presses her boss but is once again turned down. She shares the file on Reddit, where internet sleuths decide it probably is real. A little more searching and she realizes the videos are eerily similar to the ones on Faces of Death. A copycat is recreating those murders, but for real this time.

The film spends some time with the killer Arthur Spevak (Dacre Montgomery). He uses his internet skills to find people who have said mean things to him on the Internet or who just annoy him in some way. In one pretty funny bit of satire, he grabs an influencer. We first see her at a public pool because that’s the one place you can film yourself in a bikini and not get flagged. While filming, some dude runs in front of the camera, and she yells at him for interrupting her “work.”

All of this is fine. That’s a pretty enjoyable concept for a movie, and it worked relatively well for me. There was nothing about it that I found to be particularly good, but nothing that I hated either. But then it takes a turn. Margot keeps digging. Eventually she finds the killer, and they have a showdown. Well, two showdowns. Both turn the film into very typical and very average modern horror nonsense. The killer puts his victims in cages, then stages the Faces of Death kills in a ridiculous manner. His motivation is all about likes and hits and influencer culture, and I hate that stuff. I’m probably just too old for it. A younger me may have dug that content, but fifty-year-old me has no taste for it. There is a moment near the end that I won’t spoil, but I just hated. It turned the film from something that was just ok to a great big “nope.”