The opening subtitle "The Rise and Fall of Fred Leuchter" accompanied with the images of lightning around Leuchter's head that evoke images of Frankenstein foreshadow the basic premise of this bizarre documentary. Leuchter is an engineer who turns unwittingly into a "monster" and now wanders the Earth alone, unloved, and unwanted.

Some people will not even want to view Mr. Death. At the screening I saw three people leave the theater before the film was halfway finished. That doesn't mean that Errol Morris' documentary is bad; it's an excellent film—it just deals with unpleasant material.

Fred Leuchter is a "mouse of a man"—a simpleton who should have died years ago. How many people do you know who smoke 6 packs of cigarettes and drink 40 cups of coffee daily? Leuchter's specialty happens to be constructing "humane" execution devices, and he goes into great detail about them. Creating these devices had become a passion for Leuchter, and the documentary portrays him as a man vying to become the patron saint of execution devices as his mission is to make the most comfortable and humane devices possible.

It is a morbid desire on Leuchter's part. He takes glee vividly describing how the electric chair can cook a man like a chicken, complete with lurid details about humid fluids involved in the process. He is especially proud of the chair that he designed for the state of Tennessee, at one point stating that this is the device he would choose for himself.

The documentary points out how his career as execution device designer came about by accident after designing the Tennessee chair. Suddenly Leuchter was called on to assist with gas chambers, lethal injection devices, and gallows even though he had no experience with any of these. This pattern of accepting problem solving jobs for financial gain leads to his undoing.

This is where the film takes an especially bizarre twist, and our protagonist falls from executioner "sainthood." Recruited as an expert witness for Ernst Zundel (Canadian revisionist historian/author of books like The Hitler We Loved and Why), Leuchter becomes victim to his tragic flaw of pride.

Granted an all expense paid holiday, Leuchter takes his new bride (a waitress he met over one of his multiple cups of coffee) on a honeymoon from Hell to Auschwitz. She gets to stay outside in the freezing cold and act as lookout as Leuchter illegally chisels samples to determine whether cyanide can be found. This turns out to be the turning point of Leuchter's life, and the documentary takes you for quite a rollercoaster ride from this point.

Morris uses montages of expert testimony, neo Nazis, Holocaust activists, and forensic scientists along with wacky interview footage to give a truly intimate picture of Fred Leuchter. Consiste with Morris' past documentary work (Gates of Heaven, Vernon Florida, and Fast, Cheap, & Out of Control), Leuchter fits in with the other loonies. What kind of man would smuggle Auschwitz wall samples into the country via his dirty underwear? What kind of man puts a want ad in the newspaper to sell a Lethal Injection Machine? Look for Fred to try eBay in the near future!

The editing is extremely well done, and there are more than a few interesting choices of archive footage—eg. the 1903 Edison clip of an elephant being electrocuted. For a really chilling sight, watch Leuchter's smile as he tests out his various devices. This is NOT a Julia Roberts "feel all warm inside" type smile, and it's not even the inner smile exhibited by Norman Bates when he thinks he has fooled the detective in Psycho. It's a truly creepy smile of an isolated little man, who inhabits his own little universe—very surreal.

But Fred Leuchter does exist. You may even find him wandering along your local highway after he's lost access to his latest motel room or rental car. Morris captures the essence of this bizarre man in a remarkable documentary, not intended for those who don't appreciate dark humor.