My thoughts about movies and TV shows I've been watching

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Saturday, May 19, 2018

Pretty hard to stop watching Evil Genius once you start

There's only one thing wrong w/ the new Netflix documentary 4-part series Evil Genius (Barbara Schroeder and Trey Borzillieri): the title. I'm not going to give anything away (i.e., no spoilers), but I can say that the 2 prime suspects in this investigation may well be evil but they are by no means geniuses except in their own minds; each repeatedly tells the investigators and the filmmakers how smart they are - but neither got anything but trouble out of their totally bizarre bank robbery gone wrong. The robbery took place in 2003 in the appropriately named city of Erie, Penn, and the series begins, after some intro material, with live footage of the bank robbery - a man with seeming to be wired with explosives robs a small strip-mall bank branch, with catastrophic results. We soon go into Bizarro World, as we learn we see the totally weird ransom note the robber was carrying, we learn of a series of mysterious deaths that are seemingly but not evidently related to this crime, we meet the two main suspects who continue to rat out each other, neither of them convincingly, we accompany investigators - there's a great deal of footage available to the filmmakers, and they had a lot of cooperation from the various police agencies (state and federal) as well as from some though not all of the suspects and participants, we enter the homes of some of the suspects where we see squalor almost beyond belief, and ultimately we see a lot footage of jailhouse visits and, less so (cameras not allowed in courts at that time) of a trial and appeals. The story is odd at times that I kept thinking that if this were fiction nobody would believe it - and yet, to what end? At bottom, it's an examination of mental illness more than a crime story; their plot was doomed to failure, though the case against the evident perpetrators was devilishly difficult to prove in court. In the end, I'm not sure that we ever get all the answers, although for a # of reasons the case is now closed if not fully resolved. Pretty hard to stop watching this doc once you're in, and at 4 episodes it seems just the right length for this story.

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