Killer Legends (Joshua Zeman, 2014)
Half-assed documentary tracing 3 urban legends to true crime stories. Some observations and criticisms I had while watching this movie:
Why did the documentarians visit the Showman's Rest memorial at night? The mass grave of circus performers, many anonymous, who were killed in a train wreck is not scary. It's tragic. One of the most obvious places where they get their tired tropes mixed up.
I'd be surprised if a great many (most?) Chicagoans did not know who John Wayne Gacy was. The ten-minute build-up to the revelation of a "real" killer clown behind the various panics is silly. I was happy to learn of the menacing "Homey the Clown" sightings from the early 90s though.
What was with the clown these two clowns interviewed? Did they inadvertently discover that the
real reason for the various clown scares is that there's some hipster who likes to drive around in clown make-up acting overtly creepy? I liked that they left that ride-along scene without comment. One of the only maybe-intentional comedy bits.
The earnest open-ended philosophical cliches. The reheated Joseph Campbell is probably the most ridiculous: "Everyone's personality is made up of multiple archetypes. Evil Clown, for example". My favorite is "Is it possible to tell where fact ends and fiction begins?" because of how it almost immediately follows several gratuitous clips from the corny (and
fictitious, we are informed) trombone bludgeoning scene from
The Town That Dreaded Sundown.
The idea of a (black) man being railroaded and rushed to execution in the Jim Crow 50s (not that it doesn't still happen, or was isolated to the south) seems completely over these peoples' heads, even when it's blatantly implied by one of their interviewees. This is probably obvious to most people, but there's not much of an excuse for crime dramas that have a weird portrayal of crime divorced from any context in the criminal justice system. Maybe it would be more okay if it wasn't most of them. And it kind of gives the lie to the whole "cautionary tale" bullsh!t. End message.
I'm sick to death of the pretense that - among other things - "***** just got real"; e.g., the "surprised discovery" of evidence that is clearly edited together from multiple takes, and most likely researched before filming ever began. That is to say, I was already sick of phony candid gimmickry from the first time I saw reality tv, but now I'm dead, it killed me. I got a little bit of reanimation from the guy who walks up to the filmmakers on the street to be interviewed and says "Hey, are you filming a documentary?" The way it's presented makes it seem like there's some old coot who just hangs around an abandoned industrial zone waiting for people to interview him.
The German profiler they interview via skype should probably lose the pedophile glasses if he wants to be taken seriously by law enforcement. Other than that he didn't seem that full of *****.
Some of the experts they interviewed seemed okay too. The guy from the Library of Congress was actually informative.
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