This month Rialto Documentary is screening a documentary series called ‘Family Ties’ about families who live outside ‘normal’ society. Oscar-nominated filmmaker Amy Berg goes inside the controversial Fundamentalist Church of Latter-day Saints in the documentary Prophet’s Prey screening this week, and next week’s directors Maria Demopoulos and Jodi Wile examine a 70’s experimental cult led by the charismatic spiritual leader Father Yod in The Source Family. Finally, in The Wolfpack, director Crystal Moselle looks at the life of the Angulo brothers who were locked away from society in an apartment on the Lower East Side. The siblings spend their days re-enacting movies, until one brother decides to walk out the front door. It’s a month of extremes on Rialto Documentary.
Bone Tomahawk premieres Saturday 13th August, 8.30pm
Bone Tomahawk looks like a western and it sounds like a western, but there are things that go on in this film that will make your jaw drop, so best to be warned, it’s also a horror.
The grotesque violence that unfolds in this film doesn’t occur until the final act of the film, so you can enjoy the vistas and manly conversations first as a small group of men from the town of Bright Hope head off on a doomed rescue mission. A ‘tribe’ of cannibal savages known as Troglodytes, painted in white with bones protruding their skin, have kidnapped three locals, including Arthur’s (Patrick Wilson) wife. Even with a broken leg, Arthur insists on heading out to rescue his wife, along with Sheriff Hunt (Kurt Russell), Chicory (Richard Jenkins), and Brooder (Matthew Fox), a dandy who boasts to have killed the most Indians in town.
It’s a great cast and an interesting mix of genre that, depending on your love of westerns, will either resonate or not. It’s the debut feature film from cinematographer and screenwriter S. Craig Zahler. Zahler decided to step behind the camera after he sold 20 scripts to Hollywood and none of scripts ever made it to the screen. Several scripts were westerns, a genre he loves to write, and so in Bone Tomahawk he combines a ‘rescue mission western’ along with lost race fiction, and horror.
This wasn’t the only western Kurt Russell starred in during 2015 – he also appeared in The Hateful Eight, but apart from his scruffy cowboy look, there are little similarities between the films. Bone Tomahawk is subtler and slower paced than Tarantino’s dialogue heavy The Hateful Eight, and there’s clearly a difference in budget. If you take into account Bone Tomahawk was shot in 25 days on a budget of US $1.8 million – it’s a pretty impressive effort.
RAKE premieres Tuesday 9th August, 8.30pm
Criminal Lawyer Cleaver Greene (Richard Roxburgh) is back and as mischievous as ever in the fourth season of this hilarious Aussie comedy. The storylines feel more expansive this time around – well, when things get as ridiculous as they did at the end of Series 3 (Greene was last seen dangling from a balloon drifting across the Sydney skyline), it seems silly to tone things down now.
The series continues to take swipes at the judicial system, politicians and media, and not only is Rake getting himself into trouble, but those around him find themselves in precarious positions too.
What’s great fun about this series is it’s steeped in a strong Aussie vernacular that Kiwi’s can relate to, and is filled with affable, flawed and complex characters spewing forth sharp, witty lines. One of the main reasons the show has been such a critical and commercial success, is Richard Roxburgh’s take on the chaotic, self-destructive and yet brilliant lawyer Cleaver Greene. He manages to be both endearing and infuriating; underneath his wicked ways is a man with a good heart, who has all the best intentions of changing.
Prophet’s Prey premieres Thursday 11th August, 8.30pm
Hot on the heels of the sneak peak into our own Gloriavale comes a look into the controversial chapter of the Mormon Church, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints led by polygamist Warren Jeffs. Filmmaker Amy Berg brings to light the sexual, financial and psychological abuse inflicted on his congregation by Warren Jeffs, the son of the self-claimed Prophet Rulon Jeffs. As Jeffs Senior’s health began to decline, Warren maneuvered himself into a position of power, and on his father’s death (which some claim he had a hand in), took over running the intensely private sect.
Amy Berg collaborates with two authors on this film – both of who have written books about the FLDS. Private investigator Sam Brower and author Jon Krakauer (Into thin Air, Into the Wild) have both spent years trying to bring to light the atrocities that take place within the church. The film draws on information from Brower’s Prophets Prey: My Seven-Year Investigation into Warren Jeffs and Fundamentalist Church of Latter-day Saints, and Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, and both authors lead us through the events that finally lead to Jeff’s arrest in 2014 for child sexual assault.
Berg wasn’t able to get Jeff’s to talk in this film. With his surprisingly uninspiring and creepy, whispery voice, he claims the 5th amendment or answers ‘no comment’ to her questions – much like he did during his court case. However, several family members who were cast out of the Church, and young members of the church who managed to escape its clutches give us an insight into life inside the church. While Prophet’s Prey is a fairly traditional ‘talking heads’ documentary, the substance of the stories being told makes up for a lack of visual flair.
The subject matter is dark in Prophet’s Prey, but then Berg is not unfamiliar with difficult subjects. Her previous films have dealt with miscarriage of justice (West of Memphis), priestly pedophilia (Deliver Us From Evil), and casting couch molestation in Hollywood (An Open Secret), and yet there’s something particularly chilling about this case. Even though Jeffs is serving a life sentence in a Texan prison, through correspondence he still controls his church. No doubt behind the hugely protective walls that surround the compound of the FLDS, 14-year-old girls are more than likely being made to wed men who have dozens of wives already.