The parents of the injured girl really appreciate you turning her attempted murder
into a horror wankfest. Thanks, Movie!

Beware the Stupidman.

BEWARE THE SLENDERMAN is not sure whether it wants to be a documentary about two Wisconsin girls attempting murder, or a horror movie about a creature that might be real.

The girls (12-year-olds Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser) are obviously mentally unbalanced when they claim they tried to murder their 12-year-old friend in 2014 to appease an internet concoction named “Slenderman,” yet filmmaker Irene Taylor Brodsky frames this doc as if Slenderman really exists, by showing shots of him (a tall, gangly man in a black suit with a completely white head) in various locales. Film seems to play apologist for the two girls, as if maintaining that the entity being shown is real and they are not fully to blame.

It’s BLAIR WITCH meets MOTHMAN. And is that really appropriate when there’s a little girl out there recovering from nineteen stab wounds due to this overwrought jape?

I have not seen Brodsky’s other work, but she has completely lost the point of this particular film. She is trying to creep us out with ominous music and weird visuals of the lead character. But the “Slenderman” tag has only been applied to this case for sensationalism. Is it at all relevant to the fact that a girl was stabbed nearly to death? Even the title is sensationalism – not “The Slenderman Stabbings” or “The Waukesha Internet Incident,” but the word BEWARE in the title – really?! – like we have to “beware” an actual Slenderman and not its creators/promulgators who are causing all the trouble, or the gullible people who are doing things to appease it.  The only reason this film is given any credibility by the viewing public is because, ironically, people are so credulous! Audiences love to believe any far-fetched horror tale, and in framing the film in this horror movie manner, Brodsky appeals to that naïve demo that feeds off clickbait and fake news.

But there is a more horrifying and judicious documentary that could have/should have been made around this incident – the sociological angle of how an internet meme could gain enough popularity to captivate two young girls to the point of murder. There is also the story to be told of the girls’ psychosis, not the blunt fact that they tried to murder a girl – but how this idiot society drove them to be this gullible.

They claim their actions were “to appease Slenderman,” but does that afford them ANY LEEWAY AT ALL? No. So stop bringing it up! There is a deeper answer in relation to their upbringing in this social media-drenched society. Though this doc shows us the origins of Slenderman on the internet, it is done in a way that makes the character seem scary, when in reality, the scariness is in the gullibility of the uneducated hordes.

In the final telling, SLENDERMAN is treated like MOTHMAN – that other mythic creature that people supposedly sighted many times around West Virginia. Another harbinger of death, Mothman – like Slenderman – only appears to the gullible, while the rest of us keep leading lives with our eyes closed to this superstitious idiocy. So Slenderman begins to feel like a harmless superstition. But it is not! Because it has led to attempted murder. And it should not be treated with the flippancy of Mothman. The first established FACT this film should relate is that we are talking about an internet meme, not a tall faceless killer on the loose influencing young girls. We actually get this explanation about 30 minutes in. Because Brodsky wants us to piss our pants first.

Because the FICTION is more important than the suspects.
You go, ABC News, you sensationalistic asshats!

Interspersed with interviews of the girls’ families and black-and-white interrogation room scenes that are angled like Batman-Villain cameras, Brodsky keeps inserting “horror movie” shots of Slendie appearing to people, without any title cards warning us that this is a “dramatization,” or any other indication these shots are pure flummery.

With the dearth of information on imdb and Wikipedia in relation to this movie, I suspected this was just another great BLAIR WITCH marketing ploy, but with the inclusion of the great evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins offering his views on cultural memes, I could accept at least the attempted murder case was real.

Slenderman is visually just another iteration of the Shadowman, or those aliens from the 1960’s LOST IN SPACE episode (“We want the mechanical man!” – meaning the Robot). More modern visual iterations include Jack Skellington or even the long men with white heads in PINK FLOYD’S THE WALL.

A stop-motion version of the classic Pied Piper tale reminds us of Slendie’s cultural mnemonics. A reputation for taking children, like the Piper took the children of Hamelin after the townsfolk refused to pay him. Again, ominous music, meant to scare us into … uh, “believing” in Slenderman – ? You tell me, Brodsky. Do I soil my panties when I hear a piper at the gates of dawn?

The doc quickly becomes devoid of any interest once it starts fast forwarding to “3 months since the stabbing” and “6 months since the stabbing.” The mothers are shown driving home from the jail and saying they miss their girls. Okay. Now what. Well, we’re about halfway through the doc…. eurgh…

With so much more screentime to fill, Brodsky ends up humanizing the girls through extensive (i.e. boring) interviews with their parents. But instead of Morgan’s parents showing us a doll house she built with tiny pieces of pizza on the table and a tiny computer screen, the documentarian should have delved into how the parents went wrong in their raising of the two attempted murderers. Instead, we get tears and syrup stories about how “normal” the girls were – a fact which is demonstrably untrue…

Sigh… wake me when the Mothman arrives…

If you voyeuristically get off on graphic descriptions of murders mouthed by young girls, and if you sincerely believe the Slenderman might also be coming for you, then BEWARE THE SLENDERMAN is your cup of poison. I don’t really care about the fates of the two girls – they are reportedly facing sentences up to 65 years. Ultimately, this is just an overlong doc about two nutjobs who don’t really deserve their fifteen minutes, let alone two hours. And there’ll always be nutjobs in the world. Look how many came out of the woodwork in America for the election of the white supremacist. Beware the non-slender man!

END

Criminal cops and collusion as black as Whitey.

…all involved in this circle of shit in South Boston…
— Steve Davis, brother of Victim Debra Davis.

Documentary about the most notorious organized crime gang in South Boston in the mid-1970s – the FBI. Oh, and James “Whitey” Bulger’s peripheral involvement with them.

WHITEY: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA V. JAMES J. BULGER is a comprehensive look at James Bulger’s rise to power as kingpin of South Boston’s Irish mafia in the 1970s, and how he retained that position throughout the 1980s by making devil’s deals with the FBI, through to his 2013 court case.

Director Joe Berlinger (METALLICA: SOME KIND OF MONSTER, 2004) covers as many bases as he can, interviewing relatives of Bulger’s victims, extortion victims, attorneys for the prosecution, Bulger’s defense attorneys, and Boston police who worked on the Bulger case, giving all equal time. Only the FBI declined to be interviewed. Of course. Because anything you say can AND WILL be used against you in a court of law. All the evidence and firsthand reports lead back to them. They are implicated in Bulger’s crimes as heavily as Bulger is.

To clarify: Bulger is not innocent of wrongdoing. He is a sociopath whose life revolved around crime, but there was a United States organization that was enabling him, that is therefore responsible for much higher crimes, that used Bulger as a scapegoat when his usefulness was spent. In April 2011, Whitey Bulger was “caught” after being on the lam for 16 years. Caught? Don’t you mean: the FBI had grown independent enough of their symbiotic relationship that they could afford to throw him under the bus? Bulger tells his attorney how he systematically used to pay off all the cops in Boston, the ATF, Massachusetts State police and the FBI, “Christmas is for kids and cops.” (So among other reasons for “catching” him, I’d wager the payments must have stopped as well…) Upon catching Bulger, the FBI crow about him as the “most notorious criminal in the history of South Boston.” How come we only hear about this “most notorious criminal” after the fact? Could it be because they’re trying to pad their glory?

The FBI – at this very moment ­- are continuing to commit those same crimes they were perpetrating with Bulger. With some other unknown sucker! Don’t worry, citizens, we’ll hear about this patsy in 20 years when he too is “caught” and called the “most notorious criminal in the history of South Boston.” Does anyone doubt this?! The FBI has NO INTENTION of curbing its methods. We all know this! In one anecdote, we hear, “The FBI in Boston lied to the FBI in Oklahoma that Whitey had an alibi.” So if all the arrows continually point to the puppet master, why is the puppet being vilified? Whitey was just the triggerman. Why all this fuss over the foot soldier carrying out the orders and not the captain that was giving them? To be fair, even Whitey himself admits that he turned the tables on his FBI vultures, and ended up giving them the orders.

Patricia Donahue (wife of victim Michael Donahue) says matter-of-factly: “Whitey pulled the trigger, but I blame the FBI too.”

Being implicated, the FBI stand by their claim that Whitey was an “informant.” A rat. Which Whitey hotly denies. He is intent on making his case that the federal government is more corrupt than the American people can imagine. Hey man, you had me at hello.

His “informant” status is belabored in this documentary and an attorney explains why: because if it is proved Whitey was NOT an informant, then all those attorneys that built their careers on his supposed information, and all those cases that convicted mobsters, would be thrown out and the government could be sued for them.

The new movie starring Johnny Depp as Bulger, BLACK MASS (2015), says unequivocally that Bulger was an informant. Of course it does. It’s a gutless Hollywood movie that doesn’t want to offend a federal law enforcement agency.

Everyone is corruptible. There’s always a way to corrupt somebody. They’ve just got a badge that says Special Agent. There’s nothing special about them. They’re just people.
— Kevin Weeks, Bulger associate.

Viewing WHITEY, the one overarching “truth” about Bulger’s case is that there is NO overarching truth. Everyone’s got a different take on right and wrong, truth and lies, stings and cover-ups, and the meaning of “informant.” Bulger’s lawyers say one thing, the government says another. Who’s lying? Well, they BOTH are. How can the government claim to be innocent bystanders in this case if they tout him as the “worst criminal in the history…” and yet took decades to capture him even though it was officially on record that they were working with him? It means either he wasn’t committing crimes OR they were turning the other way. Now they just told us Bulger was constantly involved in criminal activity, outlining it in graphic detail, terrorizing, extorting and murdering people. So if they knew that then, what’s their excuse?

Corrupt FBI agent John Connolly; in other words, Regular FBI Agent.

Corrupt, disgraced FBI agent John Morris; in other words, average run-of-the-mill FBI Agent.

John Connolly is their excuse. And their bumboy scapegoat. He was the FBI agent that made the deals with Bulger, shielding him from FBI prosecution. He’s doing time now. Yet every other victim, attorney and Boston cop affiliated with this Bulger case cites numerous FBI agents and the Bureau’s methodology itself for enabling Bulger. Fat chance anyone else will see jail time. (Bob Fitzpatrick, an FBI agent who tried to make headway on arresting Bulger, tells us how he was continually blocked by higher-ups.) It’s like the collective corporate pigs at AIG destroying the U.S. economy, getting bailed out, and then sending ONE PERSON to jail for it. Connolly’s superior, John Morris, was also in on the gag, but somehow this “moral coward” walks the streets a free man.

Stephen Rakes, one of Bulger’s extortion victims, commands a lot of screentime – until he’s found dead! During the making of this doc! He kept telling friend Steve Davis (brother of a Bulger victim, Debra Davis), he was waiting for his day in court, that he had information tying Bulger to the federal government, “You’ll see how high up this goes!” Rakes would never get the chance to speak.

You’d think that Bulger’s younger brother, William “Billy” Bulger, being a former president of the Massachusetts Senate, could have pulled some strings, but I’m presuming he no longer had the clout. In 2013, Billy was near 80, Whitey was over 83.

Whitey Bulger was sentenced to two consecutive life terms. (Why do they play these asshole games? Just say “Life” and be done with it, idiots!)

Movie wraps on the mysterious death of Stephen Rakes: his coffee was apparently poisoned by a business associate! What the–? It was not related to the Bulger case. Mm-hmm. And if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge in Bahston I’d like to sell you…

END