I meddled with forces beyond comprehension when as a totally inexperienced adolescent I rented this artifact from Hell back in 1990.

I excitedly shoved the cassette into the top load VHS player and waited for the lurid show to begin. I'm going to make it as brief as possible; I can go on into painstaking details of how I excitedly ran home, eager to satiate my morbid curiosity about horrible death, how I was transfixed by the baleful Gorgon Video animated logo.

From there I knew I was in for something morally reprehensible but I couldn't stop myself from proceeding. The opening credits splashed on over some putrid autopsy proceedings and the accompanying music was something Satan had to inspire cause it was so unnerving, I mean these bellowing chords reached into your soul. Sounded like the trumpets of Hell, hearing that and seeing the putrefying cadavers, I wanted to crawl in a hole and pull the dirt over me.

I could go on and on about how utterly violated I felt after watching a myriad of animal cruelties, inhumanities and broken stumps of meat formally human beings. I can mention the melancholy that pervaded the room, seeing the murky, blurry, creepy old timey super 8 images, deathly vibes billowed from this unearthly relic from the 70's. I can say so much more about the demonic feels blasting out from the screen but I'm going to focus on one segment that has haunted me for 30 years!

The female cyclist that was run over head first by the heavy drive wheel of the semi truck, she is simply the most revolting and gruesome dead body I ever saw and I've seen it all to this point. The grisly aftermath spectacle of this woman is truly horrible; she looks indescribable. Faces of Death would have been a distant memory if it weren't for the cyclist segment; that gruesome woman has literally haunted me everyday for 30 years.

I've seen her standing beside my bed at 3 a.m. In the same mangled aftermath state she was reduced to; she looked completely vacant, totally revolting and absolutely terrifying. This film is a bridge for the tormented souls to crossover into the threshold of the living, to torment the ones sensitive to these forces like I.

I implore others to keep away from irredeemable, soul raping death films like this, lest you want to summon a denizen of the netherworld.

An American 'mondo' movie that pre-dates THE KILLING OF AMERICA but unlike that minor classic feels absolutely pointless and a mere exercise in revulsion. The problem with this video nasty is that exists for shock value's sake, and the genuine nasty moments - autopsy and morgue footage, a few accidents and animal killings - are negated by a ridiculous number of cheesy staged sequences which are laughable to watch, including a prisoner in death row accompanied by jolly comedy-style music.

I've discussed the video store of my youth often, but no movie in Prime Time Video inspired such dread as Faces of Death, its gigantic clamshell package covered with a note scrawled in sharpie: YOU MUST BE 18 TO RENT.

This feels like a movie made from VHS, as where were people going to see this in 1978?

Written and directed by John Alan Schwartz (using the name Alan Black for the screenplay and Conan LeCilaire for directing, as well as Johnny Getyerkokov for second unit and appearing with no screen name for his role as the leader of the cannibal cult),this film made $35 million at the box office, despite being outlawed in the UK and made a video nasty. It was not banned in forty countries, no matter what the box art may scream at you, and it really doesn't contain all that much real death either.

Try telling that to the kids in my hometown in the mid-80s.

They believed that pathologist Francis B. Gröss - actually portrayed by Michael Carr - was a real doctor who was using video to explore the phenomena of death itself. They spoke breathlessly of the moments in this movie and it was another torture test film, one people bragged about surviving.

As this was a non-union film, there weren't many credits, so it could have seemed real. But today, so many people have come forward discussing how they were involved in the movie. Estimates are that 40% of the film is fake, but the death scene of the female cyclist is real and the alligator scene also shows up in Naked and Cruel.

In today's world, we have the internet, which has non-stop access to the kind of footage that Faces of Death could only dream of having access to getting. As such, we are numb to the kind of panic and worry that one would have with this movie staring back at them from the shelves of a mom and pop video store.

Is it any wonder that Legendary is rebooting this film series but making it friendlier? Here's the logline for the film: "A female moderator of a YouTube-like website whose job is to weed out offensive and violent content and who herself is recovering from a serious trauma, who stumbles across a group that is re-creating the murders from the original film. But in the story primed for the digital age of online misinformation, the question is: Are the murders real or fake?"

Nobody is going to have nightmares about that movie.