Of the Dead

This European documentary shuns the sleazy world of mondo docs like "Faces of Death" and tries to show how different parts of the world view death. The problem is that the directors slip in sleazy mondo footage, and the unshocking footage is especially dull. The film opens with an American preparing a body for embalming, before a very long segment in Thailand, where a family prepares to bury a dead relative. The Thai grandmother lies in a hut for three days, decomposes, and is finally buried, but not before we witness the graphic killing of four oxen. The film makers also visit Belgium, Nepal, and South Korea, juxtaposing scenes between what we would consider shocking treatment of the dead, and scenes of how Americans treat their terminally ill and dying. The film makers rally around their point, "see, we are not all that different," and proceed to grind the viewer's face into this shallow statement for 105 minutes. Interviews with American muscular dystrophy patients who talk about how they want to be buried or cremated is followed by a Filipino revolutionary executed and dumped into a shallow grave. "Death" is a big topic to trim into a little documentary. There's no narrator or central idea, save the "we aren't so different" rigamarole, so scenes drag in between the carnage. If you like those shockumentaries like "Faces of Death," I feel sorry for you, but not half as sorry as I am for watching this. I do not recommend the deadening dull "Of the Dead." Also known as "Des Morts."