Not entirely real, not at all entertaining.
There are times when you watch a horror movie and can't stop laughing at the stupidity of it all and the ridiculous and often comical deaths that occur. You also laugh knowing that you're watching an unreal event and no one has really been killed. Then there is this show, that presents alleged real-life deaths in the most convoluted and gruesome way possible and calls itself "entertainment" in the process.What we have here is a rather lame attempt at creating a documentary of weird and over-dramatised deaths at the hands of people that on the one hand are either too stupid or too desperate to realise that if they go ahead and do whatever they have planned, they'll die in the process, and on the other hand we have mostly unfortunate people meeting their demise due to nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I've seen several episodes of this and the only reason I can tune in on an ad hoc basis is to listen to the science behind each death and what the body and organs go through or react to when humans decide to push the envelope a little too far. If the show were just about deaths and then the science of what when on and how death occurred, then I wouldn't have any real problem with it. What I take umbrage with is the underlying message that for selfish and hubristic reasons, all of these people somehow deserved to die and were served their comeuppance, and we as an audience are supposed to sit back and laugh through the experience of someone dying in horrible and often very torturous ways.
As an example, the man who decided to travel through Thailand on a happy ending massage tour. He heard a distant buzzing which was putting him off and when the masseuse went to investigate she unwittingly let loose a swarm of highly poisonous hornets which stung his body to death. Apparently the toxin was so potent, it dissolved his organs and the man died in absolute agony. The masseuse just ran off and didn't bother to help. I'm sorry but I find no part of that funny or deserving.
Or the man who boasted that he was able to swallow anything and live to tell, but when someone offered him their umbrella, his throat muscles triggered the release button and the umbrella opened up in his throat effectively cutting off his oxygen in seconds. So whilst being surrounded by people, no one was able to help him. Was what he did stupid? You bet! Did he deserve to die that way? Not at all. I doubt that any of the people who were there witnessing the incident weren't laughing about it.
Many people live off the land and many cultures eat bugs, but one man decided to cook and eat grasshoppers and little did he realise that he was allergic to some chemical that is contained in the carapace of the grasshoppers. Unless you've been tested for it, you'd never know you were allergic to this kind of food. The chemical reacted with his body and the poison shut down his organs and killed him. According to the show, he deserved to die as he and a friend were growing marijuana illegally.
Or the young woman who ended up in bed with a sports star only to then be shot in the head by a gun that was kept hidden in the oven. She pre-heated the oven as a nice gesture to make him breakfast the following morning and the heat in the oven reacted with the gun metal, which fired the gun as she opened the oven door. Again I don't find the death funny or deserving in any way.
This brings me to the reality of it all. From limited research, it would appear that most of the deaths as portrayed on the show are not entirely real and a huge amount of artistic license has been used for cheap laughs. While the disclaimer at the beginning advises us that names have been changed to protect the innocent, it would also appear that most of the circumstances of the various deaths are either taken from urban myths, with no real basis of reality, or the incidents are an amalgam of several deaths made to look as comical and as over-the-top as possible, thereby generating the laughs at the sheer ridiculousness of it all. Due to that I can't see a show like this as entertainment. As mentioned above, if this were a horror movie with actors then I can disassociate myself from the fake blood and deaths as they are exactly that, fake. In this case, the deaths are purported as being real with real people in real situations, so in knowing that I'm then expected to be entertained by a real persons death under the guise that the deceased person was supposed to die as they were engaging in something that they perhaps shouldn't have been. The viewing audience gets to schadenfreude over these incidents just as they would in a B-grade movie. To use the usually gruesome death of a real person for entertainment is in pretty poor taste.
There have been a few incidents where the "victims" are simply at the mercy of their own stupidity, so perhaps removing these people from the gene pool may be a blessing in disguise but with some of the actual deaths being a one in a million chance that the validity is highly questionable.
1000 ways to die is not a must see show, it's pure low-brow viewing and I can only imagine at the calibre of a person who would find any of this amusing. If any of the entertained masses ends up losing someone they care about, pray they don't end up on this show.
score 1/10
metalrage666 10 October 2016
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3559223/15145
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