Faces of Death IV starts with graphic shots of a dead body & it's cremation. We, the viewer that is, are then introduced to Dr. Louis Flellis (writer James B. Schwartz) who has taken over from his recently deceased colleague Dr. Francis B. Gross (Michael Carr) who obviously jumped ship after he saw how rotten Faces of Death III (1985) turned out to be, Dr. Flellis claims that Dr. Gross went insane & is now dead. This instalment of the infamous series of documentaries follows the same patterns as those before it. Dr. Flellis narrates as we witness all manner of human & animal carnage, some real & some fake. The real footage consists of scenes like plane crashes, the remains of a suicide bomber, traffic accidents including one where a man is knocked of his motorbike by a speeding ambulance which then reverses & picks him up off the road, stunts gone wrong, animal cremation, third world police brutality & a trip around New York from subway accidents to people who've jumped from their hotel room window & landed on a car. The fake footage is easy to spot, there's a tiger attack where someone has their arm severed, a car falls on someone & their leg is severed, a bungled robbery, a fake dog being disembowelled & cooked, someone is drawn & quartered, an assassination of a drug dealer & some of his family, a silly bit that involves genetically mutated giant leeches & quite a gruesome sequence involving Satan worshippers & their house full of grisly secrets... Director John Alan-Schwartz again mixes real & fake footage with little regard for accuracy or factual intent. This is all about gore of which there is some but it isn't as shocking as the original Faces of Death (1978) strangely enough. For hardened gore lovers & extreme cinema enthusiasts Faces of Death IV is a little on the tame side, although most ordinary filmgoing audiences will probably find it both sick & disgusting which is fair enough I suppose. The fake parts are of reasonable quality but most of the real stuff is of very poor camcorder quality, but then what did you expect, art? This is OK for it's type but it doesn't exactly stand out in a genre where your supposed to...