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MR. DEATH Send This Review to a Friend
A fact film that gives you the creeps, "Mr. Death, The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.," is another expertly presented achievement by Errol Morris, although it is thoroughly unpleasant and necessarily so. Leuchter achieved status as an expert at facilitating capital punishment. He knows how to make an electric chair work better than the ones that malfunction, improve gas chambers and make the dispensers for lethal injections. He's a mousy guy who takes himself very seriously.
The twist is that he becomes involved with those who deny that the Holocaust took place and is enlisted as an expert to go to Auschwitz to analyze brick and mortar samples. Leuchter concludes there were no gassings. Morris chronicles how Leuchter is discredited and how his celebrity status fades.
There is pleasure and satisfaction in observing his well-deserved downfall, and there's always satisfaction in seeing a film that is so well crafted and thorough in its exploration of a subject. But by its very nature this is distasteful stuff. Spending time with a Leuchter is not exactly the sort of experience one craves no matter how much one admires Morris's expose.
Yet "Mr. Death" not only strikes a blow against those who try to pretend there was no Holocaust, but shines a light on the horror and barbarity of capital punishment by detailing Leuchter's cold-blooded promotion of the machinery of death and rendering absurd his hypocritical claim that he's only helping to dispatch people more humanely. A Lions Gate Films release.
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