John Alan Schwartz also had a career as a television writer, counting the likes of Knight Rider among his credits, along with the theatrically released film Black Ice, and so used pseudonyms for his work on these films.
James B. Schwartz actually did use his real name for his writing credit on the fourth film, but not for his portrayal of Dr. Flellis.
Disabled Character, Disabled Actor: One of the "found footage" moments in the fourth film involves a junkyard worker whose left leg is severed below the knee while he is attempting to retrieve parts from a wrecked Oldsmobile. The actor portraying the unfortunate worker was a colleague of John Alan Schwartz who had lost his left leg in real life a few years earlier.
Throw It In!: According to Schwartz, the dead surfer wound up in the first film by morbid coincidence; he was shooting the final scenes of the mother and her baby when the crew happened upon the man's corpse washed up on the beach. This has been backed up by the effects artists.
The leader of the flesh-eating cult in the first film apparently started stooping to petty crime and got shot while trying to hold up a convenience store, which so pissed him off that he seemed to brutally murder his girlfriend, but apparently got out of the trial by faking his death and subsequently took up a new career driving ambulances. In reality, all these are cameos by John Alan Schwartz.
Similarly, Dr. Flellis apparently got really depressed at one point and threw himself off a building, which was caught on camera and shown in the third film, but he somehow recovered and resumed his medical career just in time to host Worst of...note (In fact, Flellis's actor, James B. Schwartz, actually has a second role in the third film, playing an injured man who's talking to a police officer — and holding a bloodied bandage over one side of his face to make it less obvious — in the background of one of Dr. Gross's linking sequences).
In the bonusinterviews of the "30th Anniversary Edition", Al Apone mentions he's the actor who plays the Arab Executioner during the beheading scene to ensure the dummy was correctly decapitated. It took no less than four tries to get it right due to the sweltering weather conditions.
Editor Glenn Turner (who used the pseudonym James Roy) mentions he plays one of the police officers during the family massacre shootout scene (fellow effects artist Doug White also plays an officer) as well as one of the cult members during the cult orgy scene (to which John Alan Schwartz played the cult leader)
Assorted Trivia
The electric chair scene was so believable that some asked the filmmakers if they could use the footage to argue against the death penalty.
The drowning victim was randomly found on a beach.
There is a huge continuity error in regards to the fate of the character Dr. Francis B. Gröss. In The Worst of Faces of Death (a clipshow of the first three movies) we are introduced to Dr Louis Flellis who informs us that Francis died after a simple medical proceedure went wrong yet in the opening introduction piece to Faces of Death IV, it is stated that Francis went mad trying to predict his own death and implied he took his own life.
interviews