VIDEO REVIEW: MR. DEATH
by Uletta Fardi, Video Reviewer

So many god-awful films have been released these last six months that I hit the video store prepared to rent an old classic. Scarface maybe, or Herbie Goes Apeshit. These had already been snatched up, probably by some yuppie douche bag who did not appreciate them.

I had a few options. I could get a foreign film. Foreign films are great if a little soft porn is on your mind. But if soft porn is on your mind, then perhaps you should quit dicking around and get yourself some bona fide hard porn. (If you really need a foreign film I would direct you to the little-known German pornographic subculture dedicated to female hammer-throw athletes. There are no pesky subtitles to contend with.)

The “health and wellness” section had a couple things of note: The Art and Practice of Sensual Massage (more soft porn), Frank Zappa’s Guide to Over-The-Counter Pills, and Oprah Winfrey’s Make the Connection (the harrowing tale of her personal journey to … well … just listening to her “philosophize” is harrowing enough).

I would have grabbed a cartoon from the children’s aisles but the guy who keeps me in heavy barbiturates blew town recently after being charged with attempting to sniff women’s panties at a laundromat; cartoons are sacred and are to be experienced in a properly distorted state of mind, so that was out.

All that were left were the documentaries. I had no other choice. I was painted into a corner. I kept telling myself, “Think! Think! There must be another way! I’ll watch anything, even Tom Hanks.” It was a Friday night. The shelves were empty. Some other desperate souls had already settled for Tom Hanks.

So I rented a documentary. I just grabbed it off the shelf without really looking. When I got home it turned out to be Mr. Death - The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.

Mr. Leuchter manufactures execution equipment from the basement of his Boston home. He rebuilt Tennessee’s only electric chair, outfitting it with such amenities as a drip pan (executees often shit and piss themselves). He restored the gallows in two southern states and invented a lethal-injection machine.

Leuchter is an odd duck. He drinks upwards of forty cups of coffee a day (that’s right, forty) and smokes like a chimney. He believes his work to be humanitarian in nature since he engineers death equipment that is so efficient as to inflict almost no pain. Counseling against excess voltage during an electrocution Leuchter says: “The meat will actually come off the executee’s body like meat coming off a cooked chicken.”

Thankfully, no footage of actual human executions is included, though we see an old clip of Thomas Edison electrocuting an elephant. It falls over twitching, smoke billowing from the tips of its ears. I am guessing this was included because people feel more compassion for elephants than their fellow man. Or maybe it was included to show what a friggin’ prick Edison was.

Things heat up when a group of Canadian Holocaust deniers on trial for publishing anti-Semitic lies pay Leuchter to go to a Nazi concentration camp in Poland. His task is to inspect the camp’s buildings for signs that they were used as gas chambers. Leuchter is chosen because he seems to be the only person in the world who openly refers to himself as an execution expert.

Leuchter returns with samples of brick chiseled illegally from the walls of the prison camp, which is now a national shrine. He has the samples tested for residual cyanide and when the tests turn up negative he declares the Holocaust a fiction. Leuchter is immediately blackballed by the American prison system (for which he did most of his death-equipment work) and finds himself homeless and alone.

Mr. Death - The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. is interesting the way a twelve-car pile-up is interesting. Get yourself a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor and rent this flick. Or if the above description sounds exceptionally whacked out, get Herbie Rides Again like you did last weekend. Just be sure you get the malt liquor.