Product Details

• Actors: Fred A. Leuchter Jr., Robert Jan Van Pelt, David Irving, Caroline Leuchter, James Roth
• Directors: Errol Morris
• Producers: David Collins, Errol Morris, Caroline Kaplan, David Schisgall, Dorothy Aufiero
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Studio: Lions Gate
• DVD Release Date: July 22, 2003
• Run Time: 91 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00009MEBK
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #98,877 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Mr. Death: The Rise & Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr." visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com essential video

Director Errol Morris has never shied away from difficult subjects: Gates of Heaven explores the world of pet cemeteries, and The Thin Blue Line sets out to prove that hitchhiker Randall Adams did not commit a murder. Morris's view is distinctive; he finds the dark humor and oddity in the most solemn of subjects. His controversial documentary Mr. Death, therefore, should not come as a surprise to audiences.

The film begins on a surreal plane, as Fred Leuchter talks about his career as a designer of execution equipment. The son of a prison guard, Leuchter found himself in the execution game when, as an electrical engineer, he offered his services to help fix the electric chair used in North Carolina. His motivation? Humanitarian; previously the device in place would torture the prisoner before killing him. After his success in North Carolina, other states contacted him to help with their execution devices, and Leuchter helped devise lethal-injection devices, gas chambers, and gallows as well.

From here, though, the film takes an even more bizarre twist. During this time in the late 1980s, Ernst Zündel was arrested in Canada for publishing neo-Nazi materials. Zündel hired Leuchter, as an expert on gas chambers, to go to Auschwitz to gather evidence of the Holocaust. Leuchter surreptitiously videotaped himself illegally gathering chunks of rock from the concentration camp, which he then analyzed. From these results he determined that the Holocaust did not occur, and he became an active historical revisionist. What he viewed as his definitive achievement, his paper The Leuchter Report, ultimately led to his fall, as states wouldn't work with him, Jewish groups targeted him, and neo-Nazis sought him.

Mr. Death is frequently disturbing to watch, and Morris allows Leuchter to speak his mind with few interruptions. The tale that emerges is spellbinding, as Leuchter comes off not as anti-Semitic but as a deluded man with strong albeit misguided convictions. He is a fascinating character, and the only thing missing is more personal information about him beyond his daily intake of 40 cups of coffee and 100 cigarettes. --Jenny Brown

Product Description

MR. DEATH:RISE AND FALL OF FRED A. - DVD Movie

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Non-Documentary-Feeling Documentary., October 7, 2005

By 

Kevin Currie-Knight "Education Grad Student" (Newark, Delaware) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mr. Death: The Rise & Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr. (DVD)

I think it goes without saying that most of the general public don't go wild for documentary films. The masses, that is, generally prefer a fictional cliffhanger/thriller with cleverly prefigured twists and turns.

That said, this is one documentary that would most certainly please those very masses. It plays like the highest rate cliffhanger and while the twists and turns are real, they are as clever as any fictive ones I've seen.

"Mr Death" is the story of Fred Leuchter, a self-taught but obviously intelligent "engineer" of execution equipment that is more humane than that currently in practice. The first part of the film is largely a biography of his rise from working on an electric chair in Tenessee, to redesigning a lethal injection room, a gallows, and even a gas chamber in other states.

If the first half is about his rise, the second half - the title suggests it - pertains to his fall. This happens when Ernst Zundel, a holocaust denier out of Canada, hires Luechter after being brought up on arcane charges by the Canadian government, where it is illegal to deny the holocaust on paper(?). Luechter's job is to go to Auschwitz to determine whether Zundel's claim that there were no gas chambers there is in any way rational. The film chronicles Luecther's travels and ultimate judgement that Zundel is correct.

From there - and Zundel eventually loses the case - Luechter's buzzing career enters a tail spin. No one in the states, that is, wants to work with a holocaust denier, much less on execution equipment. He is blackballed.

Most of the film consists of interviews with Luechter interspersed with scentery pertaining to the events being discussed. (Also interviewed are Ernst Zundel, another holocaust denier David Irving, Luechter's anonymous ex-wife, an historian who followed Luechter's Auschwitz travels with an eye towards discrediting them, and a few others.)

Like other Errol Morris films, Mr. Death will have you thinking about its subject matter long after the stop button has been pressed. It entertains questions such as how we are to feel towards Luechter. Is he an anti-semite who had mallicious intent? Is he an intelligent man who just did faulty research? Is he a man not nearly as smart as he thinks who simply wanted noteriety? Or is he - just entertain the thought - a man who has uncovered a politically unpopular truth? Who is this man Fred Luechter, and what were his motivations?

These questions are left up to the viewer. While I get the feeling that Morris wants us to feel sorry for Luechter as a man who got sloppy due to the excitement of the trial, the film never says one way or the other. The choice is yours.

So whether you like documentaries or mainstream thrillers, this is a film that is sure to ensnare you both while it is playing and after it has played.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Creepy and beautifully filmed, November 25, 2000

By 

M. Golosinski "rasputin7771" (Evanston, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mr. Death: The Rise & Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr. (DVD)

Without ever hard-selling the point, this film juxtaposes one system of state-sanctioned murder (U.S. death penalty) with another (Nazi-era Holocaust). This pairing is almost beside the point, though, as the filmmaker brings us down into the life of Fred Leuchter, a man who seems malleable and dim-witted on one level, although perhaps far smarter than he lets on. Leuchter at times seems merely a simple, ultimately compassionate individual (he believes in the death penalty but wants to make it dignified and humane); at other times the glint in his eye hints at a far different character and motivation.

Altogether "Mr. Death" is a fascinating study of a man whose macabre career notwithstanding comes across as more sympathetic than one might expect given the subject matter. Occasionally, I felt as if Leuchter were Chance Gardner in "Being There," or perhaps Zelig from the Woody Allen film of the same name: essentially a guiless person who wants to belong. That may, in fact, be rather too charitable in the case of Leuchter, though one of the movie's charms is that it leaves possible this ambiguity even as the credits roll.

Some wonderful editing and camerawork throughout. Intoxicating and creepy--a film that's hard to turn away from.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tragically engrossing, December 11, 2000

By 

Max Devlin (Irving, Tx United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mr. Death: The Rise & Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr. (DVD)

"The human body is not easy to destroy."

And so Errol Morris introduces us to the latest intriguing character to sit in front of his Interrotron. Fred Leuchter is a slippery guy. He's a self styled engineer in an industry consisting almost solely of himself: consulting prisons on instruments of execution. Leuchter himself is not even sure how he got there. "I built helmets for electric chairs, so now I could build lethal injection machines," he says. "I now build lethal injection machines, so now I'm competent to build a gallows. And since I'm building gallows, I'm also competent to work on gas chambers, because I've done all the other three." He almost laments that he's been shoe horned into an area that few others would be willing to go, but he does so anyway. He clearly enjoys his line of work and comes to see himself as a real expert. This belief in his own propaganda would be his downfall.

He's a proponent of the death penalty but has a strong conviction that it should be handled "humanely." Those awaiting execution, after decades of imprisonment, are "just like you and me" he argues. He would like to see lethal injection performed in molded seats like a dentist's office has. The condemned could watch TV, listen to music or look at pictures on the wall. Furthermore, execution could be a safe and painless process for the executioners as well. "Nobody should have to place his life in jeopardy because an execution is being conducted." And the beguiling thing about Leuchter is that he is absolutely sincere. He is completely without guile. He clearly wants us to like him.

Errol Morris tends toward the fringes in his selection of subject matter, but he rarely goes wrong. He invented a camera he calls the Interrotron that uses mirrors to show his own face directly over the camera lens. Using this and a prodigious skill as an interviewer, he manages to coax out the very essence of his subjects - often without even them realizing it. Go rent The Thin Blue Line and you'll see what I mean. Leuchter was initially going to be part of his last project, Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, but Morris knows a good thing when he sees it and decided to make a new film entirely about Leuchter. And his strange occupation and views on capital punishment would have made a good subject alone. But Fred doesn't end there.

In 1988, Ernst Zundel was on trial under an obscure Canadian law for "publishing information he knew to be untrue." He published books claiming the Holocaust never happened. He called on Leuchter as the only man supposedly familiar enough with the instruments of execution to verify whether Auschwitz' infamous gas chambers really existed. Leuchter was flown to Auschwitz where he stole some brick and concrete samples and had them tested for cyanide. None was found. This gave rise to The Leuchter Report - a now famous document among neo-Nazi groups that supposedly offers evidence that the Holocaust deniers are correct.

Now it would be very easy to paint Leuchter as a simple dupe, but Morris recognizes that he is as much a victim of himself as of the hate groups that he travels around speaking to. In the end, he pays dearly for his botched investigation and his hubris (and is still paying today). Leuchter, believing he was the savior of a wrongly accused man and "the only expert in the world" who could uncover the truth, clings to the knowledge that he was correct, despite all the evidence to the contrary and even his own admitted ineptitude at the sort of investigation he tried to do. The technician who actually performed the tests even confirms that Leuchter was wrong in his assumptions. But Leuchter is a believer.

Morris has given us a masterful film and a look at a man who is anything but simple, but wrapped in a very simple package. He doesn't provide us with ready made answers for the quandaries that exist within Fred Leuchter, but shows him to us in three dimensions. It's not always a pretty picture, but is an engrossing one