Jason VanMason

This series pretends to inform us of strange and sinister groups and persons of which we would be ignorant but for this show. Thus the title. In fact the revelations are much more mundane. A show on "The Mormons" tells little that has not been revealed by previous documentaries or even the South Park show. A show about a scary "outlaw motorcycle gang" consists of a few fuzzy clips, an interview with the clubs alleged president's brother and some still photos. The few clips are shown again and again until the repetition becomes annoying. The photo of the evil scary biker is zoomed in and out, panned right and left, up and down until he becomes so familiar that he doesn't look frightening anymore. We are treated to the old "voice and appearance disguised" bit as a fuzzy blur tells us of the crimes of the cyclists in a gurgling altered audio track. Of course this out of focus blob could be anybody, perhaps the shows producer and it could be anybody reading....anything. In one ridiculous scene eight or ten people are seated in an office discussing the evil bikers. All but two have their heads fuzzed out and one person, seated in front of a window, is obscured by a large rectangle making him appear to have a carton over his head. I suppose there was a recognizable object visible in the window. Much is made of three "brave" cops, also blurred out, who infiltrate the gang and participate in their mayhem for three years, all to gather evidence to punish the bikers. But despite the narrators frantic rant we learn that all they have discovered is that the bikers fight and stab one another from time to time. Virtually no drugs, guns, WMDs, pornography, slaves or anything else is revealed. It's quite a letdown.All the episodes I saw suffered from overly dramatic narration, use of inserts culled from Hollywood movies, blurring of details or even entire scenes, perhaps to hide the fact that they are using video clips of a totally different subject and endless repeats of the few minutes or seconds of actual relevant video. This show is on par with the "Gangland" shows and suffers from the same music video style editing. Every visual cliché is used to the limit; inserts with the edges out of focus, phony "scratches" to make digital video look like beat-up movie film, flicker-frame montages and more "Dutch-angle" shots than "Battlefield Earth"! Unless you are bored stiff and will watch just about anything that moves, forget about this series.

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