As episodes go I really enjoyed it - the show last week was hilarious and it seems Family Guy has got some of its old satirical dark humour back, which of course will not be to everyone’s taste…

The second animation film in the Rene Laloux sci-fi trilogy (the other two, Fantastic Planet 1973 and Gandahar 1988 can be found elsewhere on PW).
These are three of the best full length animations of the late 20th century and while Fantastic Planet is my overall favourite, it’s a pretty close race with Les Maitres du Temps/Time Masters featuring the stunning artwork of the late Jean Giraud AKA Moebius and a killer electronic soundtrack by Jean-Pierre Bourtayre.

The phrase ‘more money than sense’ could be tailor made for the couple featured in this fascinating documentary - the original premise of the documentary was to follow the building of the biggest house in America but the 2008 economic crash sends the film off into a totally different direction.
While I wouldn’t say I have any sympathy for the couple (the put upon maid is in fact the only person I can really relate to) and part of the film feels like you’re watching a car crash in slow motion, it does remind you that money can’t buy happiness or indeed for that matter, taste.
I wrote these few lines because the couple of people who bothered to vote for it gave it low marks and I feel it deserves a little praise as the 7.1 IMDb score suggests.

Very well constructed true crime documentary that revolves around an interview based battle of wits between an incarcerated pathological liar and a team of tenacious cold case detectives.
One of the really curious things about this decades long unsolved case is just as its about to be closed down for good, a piece of evidence emerges that no one seems to be able to account for, which in turn opens the case wide open. It is almost a hallmark of these cases that a strange synchronicity occurs involving a lost piece of evidence or through an unlikely sequence of events that leads to an important discovery.

One of the best Eastern Bloc era science-fiction/comedy films of the eighties featuring the acting talents of the incomparable Jerzy Stuhr.

great classic 70s tv series , did the 70s predict our POSSIBLE future ?

This has been a really good true crime documentary series so far. Each episode focuses on a specific case and asks whether justice has been served and in doing so leaves it to the viewer to answer the question or rather ponder if an answer is possible.
I think the value of documentaries like these lies in their ability to remind us that the rush to judgement seen in episode 2 (which we all engage in at differing levels) can have profound consequences that last a lifetime (as episode 4 shows us).

One of the essential cult/underground/bizarre films of the 195Os - watch it along with the 1964 ‘7 Faces of Dr.Lao’ for added high strangeness!

Thanks uploader for the vintage Grinch, always great to see a new animation up and be able to escape to Dr.Seuss Land for 25 minutes!

This is actually a UK BBC Storyville documentary series but I believe it was broadcast before the BBC aired it here in the UK on November 7th.
I found the four part documentary very interesting as I knew little about his background and I think the makers did a really good job highlighting the wider cultural and political issues in South Africa around his trial.
The series has been criticised for not focusing enough on the victim Reeva Steenkamp and given it is a story told over multiple episodes, I do agree that more could have done to tell her life story, but it’s better than a lot other true crime shows where the victim is little more than a footnote in the narrative.

True crime fans, especially those interested in the sociopathic dark side of human nature should definitely check out this series - each episode focuses on a deception that results in murder and I have to say, each story is very well done with a minimum of reenactment and instead focuses on the elaborate lies and betrayals that the victim was subject to through interviews with friends, families and investigators.
Some of the stories will leave you shaking your head in disgust and amazement at the levels of deception and brutality the victims experienced.

The controversy around the Faces of Death series concerning faked footage is strange as I’d say around 90% of the film comes from news broadcasts with the odd training film thrown in for good measure.
Of course the sight of real dead bodies and human injuries is disturbing and so it should be - that’s why after the Vietnam War, the US military ensured no journalists would ever again get access to the theatre of war without their permission and subject to censorship because the actual reality of war beamed into American homes was considered a factor in the war’s opposition.
Faces of Death 2 is gory but its also a window into a world we seldom see plus occasionally it is just bizarre and strange and it has to be the only documentary that segues from European avalanches to the perils of American boxing!

Some kind souls of impeccable taste are posting a collection of the best Japanese films around and with Belladonna of Sadness, not only do you get one seriously tripped out, exquisitely rendered and erotic full-length seventies animations imaginable but the soundtrack, reissued a few years ago on the Finders Keepers label, is something special indeed as well.

This is not the 1930’s version of Prometheus Bound, but a much later animated version. I think it’s the 2004 version.

We could really have done with Bill Hicks in 2020, he would have been in his element - having said that, if he’d started his career in the last ten years or so he’d have probably got cancelled before his star rose and certainly would have not got on the mainstream networks like the BBC and would have definitely been banned from social media!

If you are new to Japanese cinema or a fan looking for some new titles, the work of director Yoshihiro Nakamura is well worth checking out, starting with this film, then Fish Story followed by Miracle Apples to name a few.
Kudos and thanks as always to the uploaders for all their hard work and good taste.

Incredible yet little known documentary that follows Japanese maths professor Kenji Sugimoto and his search for Einstein’s brain, culminating in a ‘chance’ encounter with William S Burroughs and his assistant in Lawrence, Kansas just after he had left New York in the eighties.
This is definitely a file under truth is stranger than fiction film and kudos to the uploader as I was just thinking about this doc recently but had no idea where to find it again.

Perfect lockdown material for the UK! It may have been small in budget but it was huge in the science fiction imagination of the 1970s. As the creators have stated in past interviews, because it was made for ‘children’, the ITV censors and controllers pretty much left them alone, free to add their own left-leaning radical and subversive ideas.
Of course as a youngster watching it at the time, I was only dimly aware of its subversive undercurrent but as an adult who has re-watched it over the years, I marvel at the imagination, creativity and radical approach to children’s TV by the creators.

Not sure why some people were so negative…I enjoy watch true crime and this was very riveting. I don’t love Nancy Grace but the show was really good and put together. Make ur choice.

Back in the cold war of the 1980s, America may have had Christine, the psychopathic car but Czechoslovakia went one better with Ferat Vampire, a car that kills and drinks blood as fuel!
This is such an entertaining science fiction/horror film that is played straight but is so darkly comedic in an understated way. The director Juraj Herz is sadly little known in the English speaking cinema world but films like this and his Beauty And The Beast adaptation are wonderful and well worth checking out.

I am a card carrying SubGenius. Bob, Bob, Bob loves you…

Davide Maldi’s third feature, a docu-drama, follows a group of young apprentices at hotel school and Luca Tufano is one of them. The young men – there are only two girls on the course – learn basic skills such as how to serve and prepare food at the table, to balance a tray, and take an order/booking over the telephone, but there is much more to learn apart from these obvious ones. The school is renowned for its strict teaching methods: students learn that the customer is king and the source of their income. The lessons on cooking, dining room etiquette, law and religion, repeated day after day, make them endlessly confront their weaknesses, insecurities and abilities. At the end of the year Luca, immaculate in his black uniform with shiny shoes, will walk into the great hall and face the first test of his new career as a waiter and future maître d’hôtel…

The absolute true horror of what this mother did for attention at the literal expense of her son (and anyone else in her life) is worthy of the unwarranted attention to detail that other online fictionalised hysteria receives. Online personalities(Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) create environments that these unwell and homicidal personalities thrive in. Be careful what you give attention to is truth, and not another reason to stand on a soap box and get your own recognition. Personally, this story made me sick.

Wonderfully strange mystery/horror/scifi French film by Alain Jessua - kudos and thanks to the PW member who shared this and if they have any other of his films from the 60s/70s, it would be great to see them.

That Allison Mack is a bonafide malignant narcissist,along with her ex-boss…her initial is in the branding too. Gross. Glad they are facing jail time.

Betrayed and drugged by an FBI informer before being assassinated by the police while he slept, Fred Hampton was the one Black Panther who fit FBI director Hoover’s fear of the appearance of a ‘black messiah’ - someone who could unite all the races and saw class not racism as the key organising principle of revolution with his concept of the Rainbow Coalition that embraced grassroots working class groups like the Young Patriots, composed of poor displaced white youth.
Unfortunately the prevailing historical view of the Black Panthers is of gun-toting macho male revolutionaries even though the majority of the membership was young black women and I can’t help but feel that the vision of Fred Hampton was lost because of this distorted view of the Black Panthers.
One of the most essential documents of the radical seventies, the film and the message of Fred Hampton is more needed than ever.

Two of my favourite Japanese people come together and make one hell of a film with the director Shûji Terayama and a killer soundtrack by J.A. Seazer which is available on record and CD. If you enjoy this watch Emperor Tomato Ketchup!

Surreal and highly enjoyable South Korean film about a man who mutates into a fish!

I was listening to the audiobook of past Doctor Who alumni Tom Baker’s autobiography on YouTube (which is well worth a listen - visceral, painfully honest and self-deprecating) and I had totally forgot that he was in this film - great anecdote about meeting Pasolini and during filming not being able to rise to the occasion during a lovemaking scene and Pasolini’s genius film crew using a screwdriver head and masking tape to mimic his member!

One of the best films of the seventies - if you like your films strange, beautiful and imaginative this adaptation of the Gunter Grass novel will stay with you forever.

The documentary supposedly “Banned” from airing on the Discovery Chanel once completed. Had no idea about this happening.

WOW! The late, great Maria Callas starring as Medea? This is amazing!

Very interesting UK documentary on Carl Beech, the man who launched a multi-million pound police inquiry into his allegations of a ruling class child abuse ring and multiple murders carried out by the alleged group in the 1970s.
It illustrates perfectly that as a society we base truth less on facts and more on who has the most compelling narrative - this leaves us both vulnerable to big fat fibbers like Carl Beech and equally disbelieving of other narratives simply because they don’t fit within the prevailing consensus reality.
In the case of both the investigative journalists who promoted his story and the police who believed his every word, it would have made more sense to have assigned other journalists and police from the start to test the objectivity of Carl Beech’s story while others took it at ‘face value’ and simply recorded what he said - the fact that at the start no-one checked his reported injuries or computer history is shocking and I can’t help but believe that it was his status as a middle class professional that generated unquestioning belief and had he been from a working class background things would have turned out very differently.

This is the perfect follow up to the NXIVM documentary series The Vow, though it’s made by different people and India Oxenberg, the absent subject of The Vow, is the ideal person to bring NXIVM down to an individual level and understand just how the NXIVM machinery of mind control operated.
The Vow documented the awakening of individuals from the cult and its subsequent destruction, while India and others tell us in incredibly honest and insightful testimony how NXIVM brought people into the cult through successive levels of indoctrination and manipulation.

It was fascinating to see footage of Dr. Brandon Porter and the testimony concerning the Clockwork Orange fright experiments and heartbreaking to watch the testimony of a former child member of The Children of God cult recount how her violent and repeated rape as a young child in one cult was symbolically reenacted in NXIVM and yet another example of how psychopaths like Keith Raniere have this instinctive radar that allows them to prey on traumatised individuals under the guise of ‘healing’.

This is the follow up episode and in many ways the final chapter of the 1984 Canadian child murder of Christine Jessop and the incredible miscarriage of justice that follows, which is covered in the first Crime Beat series:
https://www.primewire.ag/tv/1339051/watch-crime-beat-season-1-episode-11

The first two episodes of The Con have been excellent as they really bring out the utterly amoral sociopathic nature of the con artist and why anyone can be a victim. The irony of course is that many of the people who appear in these documentaries are the ones who believed they were far too smart and experienced to fall for a lame con artist. Often they have the money, career and education that appears to back up that statement. I say appears, because actually those factors are often what attracts the con artist in the first place and that’s because the con doesn’t take place in the mind, no matter how brilliant, it occurs in the heart.
It’s on the level of emotional intelligence that they operate, manipulating your hopes, dreams and desires as much as your bank account, and that’s why the victims are so emotionally destroyed, long after they have recovered financially and sometimes legally.

PS> I wrote the above before the Fyre Festival con in episode 4 - these people were already conned by commodity fetishism, social media, celebrity and the illusion of fame long before they became willing marks for this particular con and I have zero empathy for them.