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Grimmest documentaries you've seen

Started by Hank Venture, July 08, 2012, 03:17:55 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Sebastian Cobb


hedgehog90

Quote from: Steven on August 27, 2017, 07:30:33 PM
The similar and even bleaker Rain In My Heart is still up though, brr.

Steven.
That was grim as fuck.
Almost struggled to finish my beer.

DukeDeMondo

I downloaded The Wet House off youtube ages ago but I'm fucked if I can find it. If I do come across it I'll upload it somewhere.

Steven

Quote from: DukeDeMondo on September 13, 2017, 09:34:49 PM
I downloaded The Wet House off youtube ages ago but I'm fucked if I can find it. If I do come across it I'll upload it somewhere.

Fuck knows how you'd tell the difference, between all of Daniel's The Dogs (2015) footage and home movies and that.

Phil_A

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p04tqcby/stacey-dooley-investigates-canadas-lost-girls

Saw a bit of this the other week, super grim.

Basically young indigenous girls in Canada have been routinely abducted and murdered over the last three decades, but because the girls that disappear are poor and not white, no-one has bothered to seriously investigate why it keeps happening until recently.


Lost Oliver

Still wouldn't mind watching The Dogs (2015).

biggytitbo

This old Cook Report episode on 'child porn' is super grim - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkQ0EQLmO4w&t=319s


Not just the subject matter which is as bleak and sleazy as imaginable, but the style of the documentary itself is a bit troubling. Cooks bull in a china shop approach probably isn't the best way to tackle the subject, there's one scene where he confronts a paedophile in his house and makes him burn his child porn photos on the fire, which is unbelievable. Also they show too much of some of the material for anyone to be comfortable with in 2018.

Moribunderast

Certainly not on par for grimness with something like Dear Zachary but a recent Australian documentary called Hotel Coolgardie gets pretty bleak. It's basically Wake In Fright as a documentary. Two backpacker girls are hired to work at a shithole pub in a shithole town in the middle of nowhere and the film documents them putting up with sleazy locals, the awful owner and a general sense of depression that comes from being far away from home in a town with nothing to do. I loved it when I first saw it and I think of it quite often despite seeing it almost a year ago. I think as a city-dwelling Australian it's a scary reminder of the types of places that still exist in the country and the types of behaviours that are common-place and go unnoticed. I don't mean that in a snobby "rural people are the WORST" way - I think the film just captures really well how rough and unchanged by the times this particular town is. There are places like this everywhere and most of the people are fine but I have found in my experiences in such places that there's more forgiveness for really rotten apples. "Aw, that's just Kev, he rapes a little but he's got yer back in a fight - he's fuckin' loyal, mate, like a dog that rapes."

Trailer HERE if anyone's curious.

biggytitbo

My view of Australia cultivated by watching neighbours as a kid - a bright, easy going, wholesome sort of place was comprehensively shattered by watching the crime investigation australia series. Some right wrong 'uns they have over there.

hedgehog90

#759
Wahey! I love it when this thread gets revived every 6 months or so.

I recently saw the new series of Life and Death Row: The Mass Execution, about the 8 death-row inmates in Arkansas they were planning to kill with some nearly expired Midazolam last year.
It was a good series, and contained plenty of grim IMO. They portrayed the death row inmates and the victims appropriately, and showed the senator and his lackeys to be the complete cunts they are.
It's still available on iPlayer for another 3 months:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p05xhlnw/life-and-death-row-the-mass-execution-episode-1

Watching this got me hankering for an extra double-dose of grim, so I went back and watched all 8 episodes of Werner Herzog's On Death Row, which are incredible, and then the accompanying film Into The Abyss.
It might have spun me into some minor form of depression, but they were so compelling, and now I feel a sad and empty space where they once occupied.
I don't know what it is, but I could listen to some of these people talk all day, particularly James Barnes and Hank Skinner. Otherwise, they just have fascinating stories behind them - Douglas Feldman, Joseph Garcia and George Rivas for instance.
Perhaps the grimmest one however is Blaine Milam's conversation.

They're all available on youtube. I've put in bold the essential ones:

1.1 - James Barnes
1.2 - Linda Carty
1.3 - Joseph Garcia and George Rivas (Requires VPN, just use Opera)
1.4 - Hank Skinner

2.1 - Robert Fratta
2.2 - Darlie Routier
2.3 - Blaine Milam
2.4 - Douglas Feldman

Into The Abyss

As you can imagine, the comments sections are not from the average Herzog admirers, but rather blood-lusting idiots craving a hate-gasm.
The last 2, Feldman and Milam, clearly suffered from some type of mental illness/insanity at the time, which makes it ever more depressing to read the comments.

hedgehog90

Since watching On Death Row, I've been stuck in a bit of a Herzog vortex, watching some of his lesser known documentaries for the first time.
I would not term these as grim per se, but they have a certain je ne sais quoi of grimness IMO.

La Soufrière (1977)

A 30 minute doc in which Herzog risks his life (and his crew's) to film a volcano in the Grenadines that was fit to burst. Includes some incredible shots of an evacuated town, starving dogs, reports of wildlife running into the sea and drowning, and 2 blokes they came across who were waiting for their impending death.
It briefly mentions the 1902 eruption of La Soufrière (killing 1,680), but focuses on the more devastating eruption of nearby Mount Pelée in Martinique, which occurred just hours after La Soufrière.
Both of these volcanoes resulted in pyroclastic flows, which were not widely understood at the time.
In Martinique, the nearby town of St Pierre were not issued an evacuation by the government, so all but a few hundred stay put. When Pelée eventually erupted, St Pierre was completely wiped out. Almost the entire population were killed, some 28,000 people. The documentary mentions 2 reported survivors, but further reading suggests there were considerably more.
Another eruption 12 days later killed a further 2,000 people, consisting largely of relief workers.
The wikipedia entry on this reads like an account of the end of days. I cannot imagine what it must have been like to experience this first-person.
(Spoiler - Herzog and his crew survived)

God's Angry Man (1981)

The least suited to this thread about grim docs, but anyway, in this one Herzog follows around a southern born-again type televangelist. He's a creepy, strange sort of fucker. Besides his white mop and unnerving facial features, he has something of the Savile about him.
His USP is that he gets angry live on television, and appears to hate his audience. In some ways it surpasses the craziest elements of Network.

This is how a typical day goes... He literally begs for money live on air, then he obnoxiously lists the donations coming in quick succession - twelve thousand, eight hundred and forty, five hundred, three hundred and twenty - he begs for more money, then does a bit more live-on-air accounting - one thousand two hundred, six hundred and eighty, seven hundred, four hundred and fifty. Then they have a little sing-song about Jesus and the Lads, but fuck, they're still a thousand short of an increasingly growing figure!! GIVE US A THOUSAND, CUNTS. He literally fakes a tantrum on TV, refuses to speak for several minutes while staring daggers at the camera, then flips out and starts screaming. ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS GIVE US A THOUSAND YOU CUNTS! oh, did we get it? WELL GOOD! WAS THAT SO HARD? WHAT A LOAD OF CUNTS. Onlookers begin to weep. And then another little sing-song about Jesus and what an ace bloke he was.
Mental.

The amounts of money - especially when you take into account inflation - are insane.
It's easy to look at these people and American Evangelicalism in general and have a good laugh, dismiss it as a freakshow, but it's truly fucking insidious stuff.
And that's why it belongs in this thread.

Moribunderast

#761
Man, I watched some but not all of those death row docs (couldn't find them all at the time) and now I've no idea which ones I've seen and which I haven't. I do remember laughing at a typical Wernerism where he's meeting with one of the inmates for the first time and immediately goes into a spiel about how he's not here to exonerate and doesn't care to act as an advocate. What a charmer.

EDIT: Looking into it, I must've seen most of the 2nd season. I grimly recall the Blaine and Darlie episodes, for sure. The Blaine Milam episode features soul-crushing levels of suffering and cruelty. The sort of grim viewing that causes you to dissociate and enter a numb safe-place due to natural mental survival instincts, in my experience.

BlodwynPig

Quote from: hedgehog90 on April 01, 2018, 03:01:21 PM
Since watching On Death Row, I've been stuck in a bit of a Herzog vortex, watching some of his lesser known documentaries for the first time.
I would not term these as grim per se, but they have a certain je ne sais quoi of grimness IMO.

La Soufrière (1977)

A 30 minute doc in which Herzog risks his life (and his crew's) to film a volcano in the Grenadines that was fit to burst. Includes some incredible shots of an evacuated town, starving dogs, reports of wildlife running into the sea and drowning, and 2 blokes they came across who were waiting for their impending death.
It briefly mentions the 1902 eruption of La Soufrière (killing 1,680), but focuses on the more devastating eruption of nearby Mount Pelée in Martinique, which occurred just hours after La Soufrière.
Both of these volcanoes resulted in pyroclastic flows, which were not widely understood at the time.
In Martinique, the nearby town of St Pierre were not issued an evacuation by the government, so all but a few hundred stay put. When Pelée eventually erupted, St Pierre was completely wiped out. Almost the entire population were killed, some 28,000 people. The documentary mentions 2 reported survivors, but further reading suggests there were considerably more.
Another eruption 12 days later killed a further 2,000 people, consisting largely of relief workers.
The wikipedia entry on this reads like an account of the end of days. I cannot imagine what it must have been like to experience this first-person.
(Spoiler - Herzog and his crew survived)



QuoteThe newspapers still claimed the city was safe.

Fuck newspapers. Really, fuck the media.

Quote from: biggytitbo on April 01, 2018, 11:50:13 AM
This old Cook Report episode on 'child porn' is super grim - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkQ0EQLmO4w&t=319s


Not just the subject matter which is as bleak and sleazy as imaginable, but the style of the documentary itself is a bit troubling. Cooks bull in a china shop approach probably isn't the best way to tackle the subject, there's one scene where he confronts a paedophile in his house and makes him burn his child porn photos on the fire, which is unbelievable. Also they show too much of some of the material for anyone to be comfortable with in 2018.


I remember watching that at the time it came out and thinking it was bizarre. Surely he should have been prosecuted (?) but I guess times have changed since then, what with the internet etc. I was quite young at the time of this coming out but it really stuck with me as I wasn't really aware that child porn was really a thing, let alone normal porn.

Mr Brightside

Quote from: biggytitbo on April 01, 2018, 11:50:13 AM
Also they show too much of some of the material for anyone to be comfortable with in 2018.

I think paedophiles would want more.

hedgehog90

#765
Quote from: BlodwynPig on April 01, 2018, 04:11:38 PM
Fuck newspapers. Really, fuck the media.

Fuck the Governer really, but sure, fuck the media too.
There was an election scheduled that was to take place 3 days after the eruption (which they never got round to).
3 days before the eruption however, the Governor (Louis Mouttet) received a report from a committee of civic leaders who climbed the volcano to assess the danger. The only scientist in the group was a local high school teacher. The report stated that "there is nothing in the activity of Mt. Pelée that warrants a departure from St. Pierre." It concluded that "the safety of St. Pierre is completely assured."

The only people with enough money to leave the island were the wealthy, most of which belonged to the Party of Mouttet. Mouttet convinced the editor of the daily newspaper Les Colonies to downplay the danger of the volcano, and to lead the effort to encourage people to remain. Still, some residents left for the nearby city of Fort-de-France. This prompted Governor Mouttet to send in troops to patrol the road to Fort-de-France, with orders to turn back refugees who were trying to leave. Based on the soothing articles that appeared in Les Colonies, many people in the countryside flocked to St. Pierre thinking that it was the safest place to be. The population ballooned to about 28,000, nearly all of which would perish in the cataclysmic eruption.

It was said there were only 3 survivors (2 survivors according to the doc), most notably a man who was in solitary confinement in the prison's dungeon, Louis-Auguste Cyparis. He suffered severe burns to his back, but afterwards toured the world as the "Lone Survivor of St. Pierre"

There was also a shoemaker who survived, Léon Compere-Léandre, who later described his hellish experience:

QuoteI felt a terrible wind blowing, the earth began to tremble, and the sky suddenly became dark. I turned to go into the house, with great difficulty climbed the three or four steps that separated me from my room, and felt my arms and legs burning, also my body. I dropped upon a table. At this moment four others sought refuge in my room, crying and writhing with pain, although their garments showed no sign of having been touched by flame. At the end of 10 minutes one of these, the young Delavaud girl, aged about 10 years, fell dead; the others left. I got up and went to another room, where I found the father Delavaud, still clothed and lying on the bed, dead. He was purple and inflated, but the clothing was intact. Crazed and almost overcome, I threw myself on a bed, inert and awaiting death. My senses returned to me in perhaps an hour, when I beheld the roof burning. With sufficient strength I left, my legs bleeding and covered with burns, I ran to Fonds-Sait-Denis, six kilometers from St. Pierre.

And there was a little girl, Havivra Da Ifrile, who sought refuge in a coastal cave before the main eruption. While in the safety of the cave, she heard a hissing sound as the hot pyroclastic debris entered the water. The last thing she remembered before lapsing into unconsciousness was the water rising rapidly toward the roof of the cave. She was later found by the French cruiser drifting two miles out to sea in her charred and broken boat.

From the brief bit of reading I've done, I get the impression there were considerably more survivors who were in the water at the time, but the searing wave of heat and debris (exceeding 1,000 °C) was enough to finish most of them off as well.

Several months after the main eruption, a lava dome began to rise out of the crater floor, over the course of a year it grew into a gigantic shaft, like an obelisk.
It was 350 to 500 feet thick at its base and it soared to over 1000 feet above the base of the crater floor. It sometimes rose up to 50ft a day. It became known as The Tower of Pelée.
At its maximum size, the Tower of Pelée was twice the height of the Washington Monument and equal in volume to the Great Pyramid (Cheops) of Egypt. It finally became unstable and collapsed into a pile of rubble in March 1903, after 11 months of growth. No geologist had ever witnessed the emergence of such an object before.



----------

If little else, it's a fascinating historical & geological account which had eluded me until seeing this 40 year old documentary, which I find remarkable.
Even more remarkable, is the fact that just a few hours prior, a similarly deadly volcanic eruption had taken place on a nearby island.

I get the impression it's not very well known about nowadays, even though it's ranked as the single worst volcanic disaster (in terms of casualties) of the 20th century.
Either that or I'm just ignorant of some things, and this is one of them.

BlodwynPig

Quote from: biggytitbo on April 01, 2018, 11:50:13 AM
This old Cook Report episode on 'child porn' is super grim - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkQ0EQLmO4w&t=319s


Not just the subject matter which is as bleak and sleazy as imaginable, but the style of the documentary itself is a bit troubling. Cooks bull in a china shop approach probably isn't the best way to tackle the subject, there's one scene where he confronts a paedophile in his house and makes him burn his child porn photos on the fire, which is unbelievable. Also they show too much of some of the material for anyone to be comfortable with in 2018.

"In my shop?" - a sort of proto-Tubbs or Edward.

BlodwynPig

I like the blasé way that Cook saunters into Scotland Yard's obscene material store room takes out a knife and opens up an evidence box, almost showing some of the graphic images to camera. "We're not allowed to show you these images...even if we wanted to" *shudder*

BlodwynPig

Interesting that the attorney (Joyce Karlin) interviewed in the Cook Report went on to be partly responsible for the L.A. Riots.

thraxx

Quote from: Moribunderast on April 01, 2018, 03:03:34 PM
Man, I watched some but not all of those death row docs (couldn't find them all at the time) and now I've no idea which ones I've seen and which I haven't. I do remember laughing at a typical Wernerism where he's meeting with one of the inmates for the first time and immediately goes into a spiel about how he's not here to exonerate and doesn't care to act as an advocate. What a charmer.

EDIT: Looking into it, I must've seen most of the 2nd season. I grimly recall the Blaine and Darlie episodes, for sure. The Blaine Milam episode features soul-crushing levels of suffering and cruelty. The sort of grim viewing that causes you to dissociate and enter a numb safe-place due to natural mental survival instincts, in my experience.

You weren't wrong about the Blaine On Death Row opposite.  Watching that made part of my soul die. Who the fucks bites a baby to death and then goes to buy a drink and browse DVDs.

itsfredtitmus

Live Forever: The Rise and Fall of Britpop

Lost Oliver

Quote from: hedgehog90 on April 01, 2018, 02:24:27 PM
Wahey! I love it when this thread gets revived every 6 months or so.

I recently saw the new series of Life and Death Row: The Mass Execution, about the 8 death-row inmates in Arkansas they were planning to kill with some nearly expired Midazolam last year.
It was a good series, and contained plenty of grim IMO. They portrayed the death row inmates and the victims appropriately, and showed the senator and his lackeys to be the complete cunts they are.
It's still available on iPlayer for another 3 months:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p05xhlnw/life-and-death-row-the-mass-execution-episode-1

Watching this got me hankering for an extra double-dose of grim, so I went back and watched all 8 episodes of Werner Herzog's On Death Row, which are incredible, and then the accompanying film Into The Abyss.
It might have spun me into some minor form of depression, but they were so compelling, and now I feel a sad and empty space where they once occupied.
I don't know what it is, but I could listen to some of these people talk all day, particularly James Barnes and Hank Skinner. Otherwise, they just have fascinating stories behind them - Douglas Feldman, Joseph Garcia and George Rivas for instance.
Perhaps the grimmest one however is Blaine Milam's conversation.

They're all available on youtube. I've put in bold the essential ones:

1.1 - James Barnes
1.2 - Linda Carty
1.3 - Joseph Garcia and George Rivas (Requires VPN, just use Opera)
1.4 - Hank Skinner

2.1 - Robert Fratta
2.2 - Darlie Routier
2.3 - Blaine Milam
2.4 - Douglas Feldman

Into The Abyss

As you can imagine, the comments sections are not from the average Herzog admirers, but rather blood-lusting idiots craving a hate-gasm.
The last 2, Feldman and Milam, clearly suffered from some type of mental illness/insanity at the time, which makes it ever more depressing to read the comments.

Thanks for this mate. Been looking for the second series for a while and for some reason have never been able to locate them so this is a massive help.

Watching the Milam one, how on earth does his cousin believe that the Exorcist film is real? That's more ridiculous than biting a baby to death.

surreal

Quote from: hedgehog90 on April 01, 2018, 03:01:21 PM
Since watching On Death Row, I've been stuck in a bit of a Herzog vortex, watching some of his lesser known documentaries for the first time.
I would not term these as grim per se, but they have a certain je ne sais quoi of grimness IMO.

La Soufrière (1977)

A 30 minute doc in which Herzog risks his life (and his crew's) to film a volcano in the Grenadines that was fit to burst. Includes some incredible shots of an evacuated town, starving dogs, reports of wildlife running into the sea and drowning, and 2 blokes they came across who were waiting for their impending death.
It briefly mentions the 1902 eruption of La Soufrière (killing 1,680), but focuses on the more devastating eruption of nearby Mount Pelée in Martinique, which occurred just hours after La Soufrière.
Both of these volcanoes resulted in pyroclastic flows, which were not widely understood at the time.
In Martinique, the nearby town of St Pierre were not issued an evacuation by the government, so all but a few hundred stay put. When Pelée eventually erupted, St Pierre was completely wiped out. Almost the entire population were killed, some 28,000 people. The documentary mentions 2 reported survivors, but further reading suggests there were considerably more.
Another eruption 12 days later killed a further 2,000 people, consisting largely of relief workers.
The wikipedia entry on this reads like an account of the end of days. I cannot imagine what it must have been like to experience this first-person.

From the Wikipedia article:
QuoteOne eyewitness said "the mountain was blown to pieces, there was no warning,"

Apart from the previous month's non-stop activity obviously...

Thomas

Some of these recent updates look very promising. Many thanks hedgehog for your link-gathering and intriguing posts.

BlodwynPig

Quote from: Thomas on April 06, 2018, 05:18:09 PM
Some of these recent updates look very promising. Many thanks hedgehog for your link-gathering and intriguing posts.

herzhog, more like


hedgehog90

#776
Watched this documentary on the history of dentistry last night.
The appropriately named Joanna Bourke presents:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b05p7194/drills-dentures-and-dentistry-an-oral-history?suggid=b05p7194

After watching it, I became madly fixated on my teeth, like I'd never been so aware of the sensation of just having them there. In my mouth. Odd feeling.
More than anything it made me appreciate being born in the latter half of the 20th century.
If you imagine going back in time 200+ years ago, oral hygiene would perhaps be the most immediately off-putting thing about it. Just the bad breath alone would be enough to send me retreating back to the present.

There wasn't too much of the graphically disgusting stuff (there is some and it's not nice), it was more the descriptions of old dental practices that got to me.
I don't consider myself very squeamish, but when it comes to teeth... fuck off.

EOLAN

Quote from: hedgehog90 on September 28, 2018, 11:09:24 AM

After watching it, I became madly fixated on my teeth, like I'd never been so aware of the sensation of just having them there. In my mouth. Odd feeling.
More than anything it made me appreciate being born in the latter half of the 20th century.
If you imagine going back in a time 200+ years ago, oral hygiene would perhaps be the most immediately off-putting thing about it. Just the bad breath alone would be enough to send me retreating back to the present.


Reminds me of Terry Jones discussing the make-up for characters in the Holy Grail; when they wanted to make particularly the peasants in Holy Grail look realistic to the time. They wanted plenty of blackened teeth but then later in pursuing his Medieval history pursuits he found that actually teeth were probably even in better states back then currently due to the lack of sugar and other modern preservatives in the food at the time.

biggytitbo

Quote from: hedgehog90 on September 28, 2018, 11:09:24 AM
Watched this documentary on the history of dentistry last night.
The appropriately named Joanna Bourke presents:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b05p7194/drills-dentures-and-dentistry-an-oral-history?suggid=b05p7194

After watching it, I became madly fixated on my teeth, like I'd never been so aware of the sensation of just having them there. In my mouth. Odd feeling.
More than anything it made me appreciate being born in the latter half of the 20th century.
If you imagine going back in time 200+ years ago, oral hygiene would perhaps be the most immediately off-putting thing about it. Just the bad breath alone would be enough to send me retreating back to the present.

There wasn't too much of the graphically disgusting stuff (there is some and it's not nice), it was more the descriptions of old dental practices that got to me.
I don't consider myself very squeamish, but when it comes to teeth... fuck off.


Could anything be more horrifying than children's teeth?







hedgehog90

Quote from: biggytitbo on September 28, 2018, 06:06:32 PM
Could anything be more horrifying than children's teeth?

There's a bit in the doc where they show a skull from the Victorian era, and below the teeth in the jaw itself are these odd looking holes.



We discover they were chambers of pus that develop when the pulp of the tooth becomes infected. The pus has nowhere else to go and bursts through the bone itself.
Apparently it was rather painful.