I have previously reviewed In Search Of Darkness a few years ago, and then grudgingly decided to check out the second instalment in the series back in 2021, so I was always going to get to this final part of the trilogy eventually. The runtime for this thing is 5 hours and 41 minutes, but I would say that at least 20-25 minutes of that is dedicated to lengthy end credits that namecheck everyone who kicked in at a certain level of their crowdfunding campaign while splicing in video clips of horror fans saying how much they enjoyed these documentaries, as well as sometimes mentioning a favourite film. It's just another self-indulgent, and ultimately pointless, bit of filler in a documentary series that easily ranks as among the worst I have ever seen.
The format remains the exact same, of course. A lot of posters/movie images are shown, one title is picked out for discussion, and that repeats again and again. The problem, as has been the problem with every part of this series, is that the people involved don't often have anything meaningful to say about the movies, often simply delivering a riff on "it was wild, the deaths were cool, and I loved it when I saw it." The lack of anything meaningful to say is even more obvious with the one or two titles that are discussed for less than a minute, or the movies that are accompanied by someone just relaying the plot in a nutshell.
I've already forgotten most of the previous instalments, but this time around it seems that writer-director David A. Weiner, someone we can also refer to as a blight on the landscape of movie documentaries (mistaking nostalgia and personal anecdotes for context and interesting information), has tried to present a slightly more varied mix of talking heads, possibly in response to the opinion that the first selection of people he had involved seems to be seriously lacking in diversity. The same could be said for the films, although you would expect a much more eclectic mix in an overview of the horror genre through the 1980s that has a total runtime of approximately 2/3 of an entire day.
I don't want to namecheck anyone else here, you get a mix of film-makers, musicians, bloggers, and podcasters, but I will say that there are one or two people who DO actually try to add something worthwhile to the conversation, thanks to their more specific viewpoint and relationship to some of the movies being discussed. Take those people and put them in better documentaries and I might have a better viewing experience.
I admit that I was waiting for this to annoy me, and annoy me it did, but maybe in ways that others won't necessarily notice, and maybe in ways that wouldn't annoy other people. Here's a prime example of why I dislike this series so much. There's a segment about the Video Nasties debacle (and I HIGHLY recommend checking out both of the Video Nasties documentaries, directed by Jake West). Part of this segment is illustrated by a tabloid newspaper cover encouraging people to get rid of their video nasties, and a photo showing them being burnt. But the main movie being burnt is Child's Play 3, a film that wasn't ever a part of the Video Nasty mess, and was simply, and erroneously, named years later as the possible factor (it wasn't) in a horrendous crime that shocked the UK. People might see this and say "well, that front page symbolises the spirit and language of the original Video Nasty age", but I would disagree. And there are surely many other headlines and front pages that Weiner could have chosen, from the actual decade being discussed. It's another little moment that smacks of laziness and/or ignorance.
There are other things here that irk, not least of which is the fool's errand of trying to discuss so many movies from the decade while overlooking so many other gems (and, yes, many other gems are STILL missed from what some try to claim is the definitive look back at a golden decade for horror movies). A number of movies that I recall seeing back in my youth, when I was too young for almost all of them, might not be good films, but they were in line with everything else on lining the shelves at that time: a lurid bit of cover art making promises that the film inside the box would rarely fully deliver on.
I'm sorry to anyone who thinks that this is a bit of an unfocused ramble, spending too much time to say too little of note. But if you watched these documentaries then you must be used to this by now. At least it shouldn't take you over five and a half hours to read this.
3/10
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