DVD Review for Mr. Death
| Title | Genre | Director | Year | Rating | Rented By |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mr. Death | Documentary | Morris, Errol | 1999 | PG-13 |
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About this film
Errol Morris is a director who likes to tackle difficult, almost impossible subjects in his documentaries---and Mr. Death is no exception. His documentarian style (as seen in such films as Gates of Heaven) frequently employs a dark humor and surrealism that is occasionally too much for me. However, I happen to like this film, oddly enough. Good viewing during the Halloween season, this is a film about Fred Leuchter, a man who designs and builds capitol punishment devices. The first part of the film is about how film accidentally got into the capitol punishment business and began to thrive there. However, the second portion of the film then takes a bizarre twist when it reveals Leuchter’s role in the trial of Ernst Zündel, a revisionist historian who wishes to prove that the Holocaust never occurred. Without giving too much away, this is a very moving documentary---at times a little disturbing---about a man whose incredible egotism and myopic commitment to hard scientific evidence blind him from accepting how misguided his own convictions are.