Wow! Such a good movie.

Waste of time

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

I've been over and over, back and forth through my vocabulary and my thesaurus, trying to find just the right qualifying word to accurately describe what Fred Leuchter Jr. does for a living. He designs implements of execution: electric chairs, lethal injection machines etc. I find myself falling pathetically on the word "ghoulish." The documentary 'Mr. Death' gives consideration to something I never really thought about. When a person goes to be executed by the state, where does the execution machine come from? I admit that I never imagined anyone sitting over a drafting table working out the blueprints for such a device.Yet, having heard Fred Leuchter Jr. (pronounced "Look-Ter") speak about his job, I can say that if anyone must to build such a device, it might as well be him. He seems to know what he's talking about. His name is sort of legendary (I would guess so . . . is there another person who does this? When the State of New Jersey contacted him to be a consultant on the proposal of the design of a lethal injection machine, he agreed but admitted that he didn't have the first idea how to design one. The doctor's presentation to the deputy commissioner of the prison wasn't going well, until the doctor mentioned that Leuchter designed the cap for the prison's electric chair. The commissioner's eyes lit up and he was sold on the idea without another word. Most of us could only wish to have a reputation that solid.Leuchter looks a little peculiar but you wouldn't expect someone who holds such a position to look anything but out of place. He's short, with a round face, big glasses and a thick New England accent. He resembles a very dowdy cousin of Elton John. Even if you have no objection to his work, you have to admit that there is an heir about him that wouldn't make you eager to invite him to tea. He is a man, however, that you want to listen to. He has odd stories and anecdotes that either intrigue or repulse depending on your personal taste. I can only speculate that his circle of close friends is a bit small, especially when you consider that one of his bits of knowledge involves the ins and outs of how dangerous it is to be in the death chamber electrocuting someone with urine on the floor from the previous execution. With that nugget of information and his habit of drinking 40 cups of coffee a day and smoking 6 packs of cigarettes, I would imagine he isn't exactly a fun date. Based on that addiction, I wasn't too surprised to learn that he eventually married a waitress.'Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr.' not only examines Leuchter's work, but also the turning point that cost him his job and his reputation. That came with his association with Ernst Zundel, a neo-Nazi who went on trial for public slander after he published a report stating that the holocaust was a myth. In 1988, the two traveled to Auschwitz to collect concrete samples from the remains of the gas chamber to prove that no traces of Zychlon B (the lethal gas that was used to kill Jews in the gas chambers) was present. Those samples were going to be used in Zundel's case to prove that he was right about his claims. The science was flawed and the jury was biased. What happened to Leuchter's reputation was a full-frontal assault on very the idea of free speech. His views and his mere association in the Zundel case cost him everything. He became a pariah, a lamb to the slaughter just for speaking his newly acquired views against the holocaust. Whether he meant it or was just saying it to impress some new friends hardly matters. The fact that he said them was damning enough.'Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr.' comes from one of the most creative minds to ever to work in the arena of documentaries. Erroll Morris never plays it safe. His films are never about ordinary people doing ordinary things. He loves the circus freaks among us, people who do and are obsessed with odd things. He made: 'Gates of Heaven', about the owners of a pet cemetery in Southern California; 'Vernon, Florida' about various weirdos in the title town including a man who lives, breaths, eats and sleeps and dreams turkey hunting; 'The Thin Blue Line' a film about a murder in a small town that was so persuasive that it sparked a reopening of the case; 'A Brief History of Time' about the life and theories of Stephen Hawking who discusses his understanding of the vastness of the universe while suffering from a condition that renders him almost completely unable to move.Here again, Morris chooses someone out of the ordinary. Fred Leuchter Jr. is an odd little man with a ghoulish job, who takes up with the wrong side of the holocaust and doesn't resend it in order to save his reputation. Why? What happens to Leuchter's reputation once he takes the side of the Neo-Nazis is, I think, criminal. He chose the wrong friends, said the wrong things and made people believe what he was saying simply by saying it. Was he a Neo-Nazi? Who knows? Who cares? Leuchter is a product of our times, times in which verbal intolerance is put on the shelf with mass murder, when people are so outraged by the act of being offended that they commit a character assassination of a man just for publicly stating his opinion. What happened to him was a pitiful revelation that words and kill just has inhumanely as a botched electric chair.**** (of four)

This is a documentary that feels like a compressed news broadcast. Errol Morris, the reason why Werner Herzog ate his shoe, makes this documentary about, well, the rise and fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., also known as Mr. Death. During the 70's and 80's, Mr. Leuchter found himself in a successful niche improving upon and creating new machines to implement capital punishment. Though he was not a licensed technician, he sold blueprints and homemade machines to state penitentiaries as well as acted as a consultant on the lethal machines in prisons across the country. Where Mr. Leuchter went awry was when he was contacted to investigate the truthfulness to the claim that Nazis used lethal gas to exterminate thousands of people at concentration camps in Germany and Poland. His research found him knee deep in the ruins of Auschwitz, taking rock samples off the walls of gas chamber rooms to take back to the United States for arsenic analysis. His research turned up no traces of cyanide in the wall samples nor evidence of the structural integrity of the supposed gas chambers to safely contain the gases. He presented his findings to the trial of Ernst Zundel, a holocaust denier on trial in Canada for publishing documents refuting the Holocaust ever occurred, and was successively outcast from society as a fellow Holocaust denier. Through Morris' ninety minute film, we are shown the relative success of a man quickly sink to the bottom of the world's hating order through the publication of one research project. Mr. Leuchter is portrayed as objectively as possible in this film, sometimes even going to black while his voice continues, but the sheer tenacity of this man makes me grit my teeth with rage when I think of him. His lack of concern for human life and the sufferings of others and his ambivalence towards people as both models of death and financial gain is a horrifying example of what kinds of people do what kinds of things in this world. The movie was well made with nice interludes of beautifully shot slow motion 35mm as well as video footage from trials, video from Leuchter's own research in the tombs of Auschwitz, and the interviews of Leuchter sitting and talking about his work as calmly as a dove coos.

The smartest thing for Fred Leuchter to do when confronted with the notion of providing proof as to the reality of the Holocaust would've been to simply say no. But since he was clearly unwilling to do so, the next best thing would be to would be to approach the situation objectively and scientifically. In the film he says several times that he was looking for evidence to prove the existence of gas chambers in Auschwitz, and was unable to find any. He also states that the sites were exactly the same as they were back in the 1940s, although he offers no evidence to back-up this assumption. He has absolutely no way of knowing what has happened to the chambers over the course of 40-50 years. A scientist would've realized this and come to the conclusion that the evidence he was gathering could potentially be flawed. Instead he approaches his task with the assumption that any information he gathers is 100% correct and that no tampering is possible, which is a fatal mistake. The fact of the matter is that Fred Leuchter has absolutely no idea what he's talking about, the way in which he gathered evidence and conducted his investigation was fundimentally flawed. He should've understood this and testified to that effect. For whatever reason he decided to jump to the conclusion that he was correct under any circumstance and propagated lies because of it. For this reason he is deserving of any repricussions that resulted from his actions. I have no sympathy for a man that is blinded by his own ego, or whatever it was that caused him to close his mind to many legitimate possibilities.

In this documentary, we get several unusual angles of Fred Leuchter's face and a plethora of unflattering freeze frames. What effect does this have on our viewing experience?Although Leuchter comes off as a coffee swilling, chain-smoking simpleton with little to no comprehension of the gravity of the situation he's stumbled into, I'd argue that most people will condemn Leuchter instead of sympathize with him. My question is this: in what ways does Errol Morris paint a sympathetic picture of Fred Leuchter, and to what effect does Morris use Fred's innately creepy appearance to accentuate Leuchter's stupidity?