Bounding Into Halloween (Edgelord Edition), Night 13: Come Test Your Might Against ‘A Serbian Film’ & ‘Faces Of Death’
It doesn’t get harsher than Mondays, and that’s why it’s the perfect day to gauge the delicacy of your human nature with two disturbing films that scar the mind. Still, they’re also a rite of passage for most adolescent horror hounds who wish to temper their desensitized spirits.
Whether you consider them snuff films, mondo horror, or just plain vile, these movies will continue to have an impact on unwary viewers long after we all meet our inevitable demise. Now, let the pearl-clutching commence!
A Serbian Film (2010)
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This notorious cringe-fest is the feature debut of Serbian comedy director Srđan Spasojević, and there’s nothing funny about it whatsoever. Well, aside from the fact that he cast himself as the main character, Miloš.
He’s a newly retired porn director/actor who’s having a hard time pumping out the dough to provide for his wife/former costar and their young son. Desperate to make ends meet, he comes out of retirement for one final score that promises to bury Miloš beneath a huge wad of cash, and all puns in this paragraph are most certainly intended!
He meets with the director of the project and agrees to do the “art film” without even seeing the script first. There are stories dating back to the dawn of humanity that caution people against agreeing to something without knowing all the details. That doesn’t seem to bother the over-the-hill pelvic thruster, and we already know how that’s going to work out for him.
Miloš embarks on a deranged odyssey of torture, drug-fueled fornicating (both consensual and non-consensual), necrophilia, and the highest degree of p**ophilia that can be reached by anyone evil enough to try.
Like the next feature, this isn’t an enjoyable watch. It’s social commentary in the form of graphic exploitation, and there’s nothing artful about it.
The disturbing moments are effective, but they barely cover a quarter of a boring movie full of half-baked characters that feels like it was written by a reclusive 13-year-old nobody messes with because they’re afraid that person will come blow up their house in the middle of the night.
If you have what it takes, A Serbian Film is available to rent on Fandango. Here’s the trailer:
Faces of Death (1978)
Here it is, edgelords and edgeladies! The granddaddy of snuff films, and a staple in every self-respecting video store from back in happier days.
This classic “shockumentary” did for the Horror genre what the late G.G. Allin did for Punk music by making it a grotesque freakshow that appalled everyone who witnessed it.
But it also became a top attraction for newcomers looking to indulge their morbid curiosity. I’m talking about the legendary mondo flick, Faces of Death!
With no plot to speak of, the film claims to contain actual “real-life” footage of death from all around the world, and it’s narrated by someone who claims to be a pathologist.
It shows a mixture of archival footage that includes an execution, alligator attacks, cannibal sex parties, road accidents, autopsies, and a restaurant in Egypt where customers get to bludgeon a monkey on their table before eating its tenderized brain matter.
Aside from the slaughterhouse footage, almost all the sequences were staged, but nobody would know this until recently. The movie is gross, pointless, and the narrator’s voice could put an entire classroom into a deadly coma, but at least this movie is friendlier to newborns.
Faces of Death is over on AMC+, but you’re better off listening to an album of the same name by up-and-coming Rap group, B.O.N.E. Enterpri$e (aka Bone Thugs-n-Harmony) on YouTube:
NEXT: Bounding Into Halloween Night 13: ‘Martyrs’ & ‘Cannibal Holocaust’
