Faces of Death (2026) - My Take (Spoilers)

 

This was yet another Scream Unseen so it's not something I had any intention of wasting one of my movie slots on, even if I had ones left over. I only knew it existed because there was a trailer for it at the previous Scream Unseen.

The concept here is that someone is taking scenes from the actual, original "Faces of Death" released in 1978 (thank you Wikipedia), recreating them, and posting them on social media. Since the movie had various and sundry "scenes" they translate well to the short video format used on YouTube, TikTok, etc.

The original movie was mostly fake with real footage from other sources, sometimes recreated for effect (thank you Wikipedia). I was of an age when I remember when this came out and yeah, it was a rite of passage in some respects. Mostly it was people going "ew" and watching other things. It wasn't nearly as pervasive as some try to make it. Of course it had its fan base but what gross movie doesn't?

The main character is a woman who's job is to review reported content on a social media site. It's obviously meant to be TikTok but that's to be expected. It shows her going through various and sundry videos, approving or denying based on content. Per policy she lets the gross and violent stuff through but has to remove the ones dealing with sex education. No heavy handed writing there. Nope.

They show her taking blue pills she keeps in a baggie in her pocket. It turns out she's got anxiety because her sister was killed while the two of them were filming what they wanted to be a viral video. They were on train tracks and trying to film themselves in front of the train until the very last minute. She got away, her sister slipped on the gravel and was under the train when it passed. The main character is recognized by people as Train Girl.

I let that one go. She's not in any way distinctive physically so there's no reason why people would continue to recognize her because of the short attention span these videos have. Unless maybe she's living in the same area and people know here that way? Didn't seem like it but I can assume.

When she sees a second one of the videos in the same format she gets concerned and talks to her supervisor/friend about it. She's reminded that it isn't her job to make the call, she needs to follow the rules, and that she's signed an NDA so she can't talk about it outside work. I would think potential murder trumps an NDA but what do I know?

The videos are just fake enough to make you question them. That's done well. There's a consistency in using red tape over the eyes of mannequins used in the shooting and also in the scenery. They show the comments pouring in on the videos as people debate if it's real or not and how much they enjoy the content.

We see the killer early on. He works at for a cellular phone company and uses admin access to dig into how to find an influencer he's obsessed with. She's actually a pretty harmless one as influencers go. Per her own content she just wanted to show makeup tips and then things got popular so now she feels that she needs to keep her followers happy. The killer tracks her down and kidnaps her.

The main character uses her roommates laptop because she's on an internet break. She does this to try to track down the creator of the potential snuff content. Using techniques that don't really exist she makes progress but wants/needs the original uploads to look at metadata. Yes. They use the buzzwords. She coerces her boss/friend out of the office while he's working overtime and uses his computer to copy over all the videos. She's still taking those blue pills and the movie makes a point of her tossing the bag on the desk instead of putting it in her pocket like she's done every other freaking time it's shown.

Long story short(er). She gets fired for the pills and because she can't let this situation go. She buys a laptop so she can do her own research because her roommate told her she was getting too involved and wouldn't let her use his anymore. She continues.

The killer kidnaps someone from a TV news station and his son, who happened to be home at the wrong time. They show the holding cages in the killer's basement with the influencer and the father-son duo. The father gets pulled out and used for the next video being shot. Literally.

I can't remember how the main character figures out who the killer is and where he lives. She tries talking to the police and gets brushed off. The killer sets up a honeytrap and gets the information on the main character so he can use her, killing her roommate in the process. She decides to go in on her own. Predictably she's caught and put into the empty cage. She uses a convenient self defense lipstick knife her roommate had to escape and she's able to get the influencer free to go with her. They break out while the killer hunts them but go out into the fenced back yard that has undeveloped land behind it.

The influencer gets shot (obviously no one in the subdivision cares about the sound of a high power rifle being fired repeatedly) and dragged back. The main character stays back to get evidence and snags the convenient external hard drive labeled FOD. When she runs away she gets away. The hospital finds ketamine in her system from when he knocked her out, the nurse lectures her, and gives her a bottle of Narcan.

The killer has brought the influencer back into the house and puts on his meek and mild clothing and persona when the main character brings the police over to check things out. He was smart enough to make his own 911 call about being stalked and describing the main character. The police believe him, the calm meek guy who said he's being stalked, over the almost hysterical main character saying there's dead bodies and people chained up in his basement. He was even clever enough to turn up the music so it drown out the sound of the still alive influencer moaning in the kitchen.

I'll wrap this up.

The main character goes back to have this out with the killer. On the Uber ride over there she's huffing the Narcan. She gets there, he drugs her again, and she goes with it. When she's in the filming room she pops up and they fight. She stabs him with the lipstick knife she brought in until she can get to other weapons. There's the mandatory "hide from the killer" scene. There's the mandatory extreme horror scene. There's a mandatory wrestle on the floor covered in blood. There's the mandatory bad guy monologue on how he's giving the people what they want. Surprise, she's wearing a button camera and has all of it on the memory card. As he's lying there, bleeding and cursing, she uploads it to social media.

End of movie.

I will say the concepts weren't bad. Using an old discredited horror/slasher/fake documentary as his inspiration the killer uses people's fascination with extreme content to kill people and get accolades. The prevalence of social media in young people's lives fuels this kind of thing, which isn't really wrong. It's more a commentary on that than on the killing itself, even though he uses prominent social media people as his victims.

What was bad was the story wrapping those concepts. Disbelief had to be stretched to the breaking point when it was the race between the killer and the main character, then the battle between the main character and the killer. Putting his confession on social media was a "cherry on top" kind of thing, since that's where he put his crimes.

She had to go back because the hard drive she took was hit with a bullet during her escape. There are ways to recover data, you know. The police can do that. But that wouldn't have worked with the plot.

This is also one of the increasingly popular non-endings that I'm seeing. Yes, the killer is seriously wounded and his confession is made public. But there's no conclusion. Just her sitting there covered in blood, laughing/crying that the upload finished and the comments start. Maybe they wanted to make the statement that the same public that adores you will turn on you in a heartbeat? I don't know.

The lipstick knife also bugs me. It's a pretty nice self-defense weapon. The top is real lipstick. Removed it's about an inch long curved blade. But it's not an attack weapon and wouldn't have caused near the damage they showed in the fight. It's like using a .22 gun for self-defense. It just pisses them off.

Project Hail Mary User Review Annoyances

 

Yes. I chose the annoyed guy meme as my cover image because he pretty much nails my expression when reading far too many user reviews of this movie. I read the reviews mostly to downvote people who bitch about things in the book that aren't in the movie, things in the movie that aren't in the book, and how the book and the movie are different in general.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

Have I made this clear enough yet? Because I can paste a hella lot more of that pair of sentences.

THE BOOK IS NOT THE MOVIE. THE MOVIE IS NOT THE BOOK.

One more for good measure.

Here's something people need to learn:

Adapt: to make suitable to requirements or conditions; adjust or modify fittingly.

The book and the movie are different mediums. The book needs to be ADAPTED to the medium of film. That doesn't mean copy-pasting the text into a screenplay. It would be much easier if that were the case. No. It means taking what's in the book and figuring out what the heck is going to play visually.

If you've read the book, which I do recommend, you'll find there's a crapton of science, a crapton of monologue, and a crapton of buildup to the mission itself. That buildup involves a crapton of people who make brief appearances. None of this is going to translate well into two and half hours of screen time.

I get it. People have opinions. That's why they write reviews. I'm perfectly fine with them writing them. I'm not perfectly fine with their opinions about how the book should have been adapted. None of them are screenwriters. None of them are directors. None of them have the slightest clue about how to adapt a novel to a screenplay. But darn it all if they present themselves as the high arbiters of what should be done.

I don't do that in my reviews. I think this is the only review I've done that even mentions the source material and even then I separated it out from the movie itself. That's because I understand that a book needs to be adapted to a movie.

There's people whining that they "dumbed down the science". If you've read an Andy Weir book you know you're going to be reading a science heavy book. A very science heavy book. It's easy to have your eyes glaze over at times as he goes through the science accurate processes needed to do what needs to be done. Imagine that on the big screen, taking up precious time. Do you really want to watch Grace incrementally increasing the percentage of nitrogen in the taumeba farms by 0.05% until they get to where they need to be? That's going from zero to over 3%. I'll let you do the math on how many iterations that is and how long it would be to show each one. The movie shows that he's doing it and then shows the labels on the breeder farm with percentages and success/fail. That's maybe two minutes of screentime but gets the entire concept across.

Then there's the outcry about the coma resistant gene being removed from the movie. Even Mr. Weir admitted it was a cheap way to deal with the plot progression. But it worked, in the book. There was no reason to put it in the movie because they handled the situation in another, more suitable for a movie way. Same result, different method.

I'm gonna keep going on some of these, let me tell you. Because I'm peeved and I have a blog.

The book has an entirely different time progression. It was years between when Grace was brought onto the project and the launch. Literally years. They had to build the ship and send it up in parts, to be assembled by people on the ISS. They had to do things like build the spin drive, which was not a done deal when it was shown in the book. Plus they didn't add the third side that was a squeegie for the dead astrophage for some reason but hey, seconds matter in a movie.

Grace did do EVA testing in the book. He tested various and sundry pieces of equipment and was versed in how things worked. Stratt had him involved in the project to the point where he was doing paperwork on the remaining things that could be brought onto the ship. It was stated that everyone on the project considered him Stratt's second in command. That's not something that happens in a few months, as the movie implied.

And then there's Rocky. Rocky did have a different "tone" in the book, no pun intended. Rocky was an experienced engineer and had his own wealth of wisdom. He was more somber, more focused, and at many times fed up with the far less somber and focused Grace. Although when science was on the line it was Grace who led the charge. When it was a more abstract problem Rocky was the one who could break it down, as engineers tend to do. They didn't take that all away from him but they certainly made him a less somber personality.

The ending difference really set some people off. Like, they got legitimately angry about the changes. They didn't see why those changes had to happen. They honestly did. In the book Rocky's planet has a much much higher gravity than Earth, and Grace suffers from living in it. He's arthritic, he's never really recovered from the nutrition deficiencies on the trip to Erid, and he's older. You simply can't do that with an attractive charismatic actor. It would be stupid. Instead they give Grace a home.

I will touch once and only once on the "meburger". No one in their right mind would have put cannibalism in this movie. Grace even says that's what it is but he's justified it as not really cannibalism because he's eating himself. If you haven't read the book, which I do recommend, his protein source is his own cloned muscle tissue, the process which the Eridians learned from the laptop and data he gave them. That bit of morbid humor stays in the book.

Another part of the ending that changed was the fate of Earth. In the book Rocky tells him that their scientists see that the sun is brighter. That's how Grace knows his message got back safely. It's a good line and says all that the scientist needs to hear. The movie, a more visual format, has the Earth team with the sample and his recordings. It closes the loop between him and Stratt. There's no closure like that in the book.

I will note something that I read online when people were debating the ending changes. By the time Grace finds out about the sun it's been at least twelve and probably a lot more years since it happened. We're never really told, or I don't remember, how long the trip from Tau Ceti to Erid took. Let's say twenty years. If Grace did decide to go back he would have been twenty years older, suffering from the gravity and nutritional effects, have to risk the coma again when he's less healthy, and there's a good chance everyone he knew would be dead. Staying on Erid isn't that difficult of a decision when those things are factored in. The movie has less time passing on Erid but still would send him home to an unknown world where he's generations behind whatever happened. His world is gone even if the planet survived.

Those are the bigger things that keep coming up in the user reviews, and that little one tossed in at the end that I like to think about. It's OK to like both the book and the movie for what they are. It's OK to like one but not the other. It's not OK to compare them and get whiny that they're different.

2026 is the year of "Project Hail Mary". People are going to be talking about it for a while because I don't see anything coming out this year that has the broad appeal of this one and has a good book behind it. It will be bouncing in and out of theaters during the year as well so people can go see it again on the big screen.

One last peeve then I'll stop.

There's an audiobook for this that people love. The first potential voice for Rocky in the movie is the voice actor from the audiobook, which I find amusing. But for the love of all that's holy do not tell people that they have to listen to it rather than read the book. Seriously. People are telling others to not read the book, listen to the audiobook. Not everyone wants to listen to books, you know. Some of them, including me, prefer the written word so we can put our own voices to the text. Recommend it all you like, but don't say one is better than the other. They can both be good, in their own ways.

One last last peeve and then I'll stop.

Because of the name there's a significant number of people who thought this was a religious movie or one that had religious overtones. It doesn't. The title doesn't refer to religion - it refers to an American football play. As soon as I see someone referencing Bible verses in their writeup I lose all respect for them and assume they don't know their ass from their elbow.

Hunting Matthew Nichols - My Take (Spoilers)

 

This was yet another Scream Unseen. There's been quite a few of them in a row. I can see why they've been doing this because the movies, quite frankly, need all the help they can get.

"Hunting Matthew Nichols" is a combination pseudo documentary, found footage, and cult movie. That means a lot of people speaking for the camera with title cards as to who they are, shaky camera work, and pure laziness.

Side note. I'm sick and tired of writers falling back on the satanic cult thing to wrap up a storyline. It's flat out lazy and the market has been flooded for a while. It feels like they can't quite figure out how to tie it all together so they slap a cult situation in and call it good. No. It is not good.

The premise here is that Tara is still looking for answers as to why her brother disappeared twenty three years earlier. Her brother's friend also disappeared with him but she really doesn't care about him. She's back in her remote hometown with a director and camera person. She also makes a big point of the fact that she's worn the necklace her brother gave her all those years. It's silver with a kind of viking/celtic design.

While she's there she interviews her own family, the family of the other kid, and the police investigator. These are mixed in with her going through the evidence box the police finally coughed up. Why that took twenty three years and a court order isn't really discussed. In the box is a bone totem along with video tapes, etc.

Oh. The movie also notes that the area has an unusually high number of unsolved missing persons cases.

What we get is Tara overacting about everything. The police investigator also gets her own overacted monologue. The other kid's father gets exposition but he keeps it lower key. We get a lot of talk talk talk. It's how we find out about a local legend where there's some sort of old settlement with a creepy guy who showed up once in a while then they all went missing.

The father of the other kid hands over an old journal that the boys supposedly found in the local history museum and seem to have taken because when Tara saw the footage of them finding it she went there and didn't find it. It has a pictorial version of that legend along with other stuff. Including, big surprise, what seems to be an incantation and ritual.

The found footage comes from tapes they find in the evidence box. Unusually we don't get to see much of it. We see the reactions to people watching it. Tara figures out the tape that was in the video camera found in a weird abandoned cabin the police decided was the last known location of the kids isn't in evidence. She has to get another court order for that.

The police investigator gets her monologue when Tara confronts her about the missing evidence. That's when the investigator says it was withheld for the public good and that she can't take Tara to the cabin (or give directions) because the city tore it down.

Tara does get the last tape and this is the most we see of the found footage. It's the standard horror stuff with scared people, voices off camera, and horror violence. Yeah. Given that Tara is adamant that they go to the site of the cabin.

The camera person quite wisely decides to nope out. The director has a brief internal struggle but does go. Off the two of them go into the woods with a map, some supplies, and hopefully an end to this rather drab and boring movie.

They get to the site. It's completely clear, as if there had never been a cabin. Being the careful people they are they set up their little pop tents in the clearing. Sigh.

Tara, being Tara, attempts to perform the ritual she found using her necklace, her blood, the bone totem, and what she found in the journal. It's a bust and they go to bed.

Except maybe not? Because they get woken up to find the cabin, right where it was before. Not that they know it was exact but hey, there's a cabin where there wasn't a cabin. So of course she goes in, in the middle of the night, after performing an unknown ritual. The director has an internal struggle then follows her in.

She's doing another ritual on the cabin floor and says she's in contact with her brother. This is where I kind of frown and wonder if it's a clue, a foreboding, or a mistake. She's using her necklace as the conduit and doing the "right for yes, left for no" form of contact. For every question where she says the answer is yes, the necklace is swinging left for her point of view. It's going to the right for the director (and camera) in front of her.

This is the only potentially interesting thing in the movie, in my opinion. Because it would have been a great way to forebode what's going to happen and how much she's caught up in her own needs. When she asks if she's speaking to her brother, it goes left from her point of view but she says it's proof it is him.

Anyway. Now we're into the cult thing. A door opens in the cabin and she's dragged into the darkness after she asks her brother to show himself. The director wisely beats feet out of there, dropping his camera in almost the exact place the evidence photos showed her brother's camera.

Tara does run out of the cabin saying she was wrong and it wasn't her brother. Duh. The director gets his foot caught in an old bear trap and kinda can't run much now. He blacks out (or something) and wakes up to see Tara standing naked in front of him, facing away and looking at a tree. He looks up to see other nekkid people with shiny eyes and decides that the bear trap ain't going to keep him there. She's got shiny eyes. He runs, leaving the camera. It shows a lot of people coming down from the tree and following him.

Credits roll.

A quick scene has the camera person running in the hospital and the director is in bed with bloody bandages around his face. He sits up and screams.

Now the movie is over.

Yeah. Not a lot I can say about this one. I guess we're supposed to think there's a cult out there that's taking people and they're living in the woods? There's something supernatural living in the deep woods? I dunno.

I do know that having Tara's obsession with finding out what happened to her brother just isn't that interesting. I found no compassion for her because she's a whiny, demanding bitch here. She shows up and disrupts people's lives for no good reason. She lies to the police investigator who told her to turn off the camera, she said she did, and the director is crouched outside the room with the camera on. Yeah, obsession. I get it. It still gets dull.

The whole cult thing also doesn't do anything. It comes out of nowhere. There's absolutely no indication that there's anything going on, except the statement about disappearances. No one in the town seems to know there's anything hinkey in the woods all around them. Plus the guy in the hospital would not have blood soaked bandages. Hospitals frown on that kind of thing when the patient is admitted and under care.

So I'd say skip this one as I say to skip so many of the horror movies being released. I honestly don't know why there's a glut of them now and why they're so bad. Independent filmmakers are not spending their money wisely if this is what they're choosing to make.