Faces of Death

A mondo compilation sold as authentic documentation of death, presented by a fictional pathologist, and a substantial share of it is staged.

The monkey-brain sequence, the most notorious thing in it, was made with a puppet and cauliflower. Several deaths are actors. The real material is mostly stock news and abattoir footage, which is the part nobody talks about.

Its importance is entirely as a phenomenon. It made an enormous amount of money on video, it was marketed on the claim of being banned in 40-plus countries, and that claim did more to shape the video nasties panic than most of the actual nasties did.

As a film it is 105 minutes of narration over other people's footage.

Successfully prosecuted. Six sequels followed, increasingly composed of clips from the earlier ones.