The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker | Movie Review

If you were alive in the United States in 2013, you probably remember this story. It is the epitome of the phrase “going viral.” And now Netflix has released a documentary about it called The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker.

In February 2013, Kai Lawrence was hitchhiking around California. He caught a ride with Jett Simmons McBride, who crashed his car into a construction worker, pinning him against a truck. When a woman who witnessed the accident got out to help, McBride attacked her. Heroically, Kai attacked McBride with a hatchet he was carrying, saving the woman from harm. After an interview with a reporter from the local news station, Kai’s story went viral. But what happened to Kai after his rocket to stardom stalled?

I remember this story vividly. Like most of the country, I also got a kick out of Kai. And like most viral news stories, I forgot about him almost immediately. I seem to recall reading some article about him being arrested for murder but I wasn’t interested enough to really read it. In short, this documentary seemed targeted to someone like me.

The documentary doesn’t actually talk to Kai himself. Instead, it revolves around all of the people that surrounded Kai at the time, as well as some of his family members. We hear from the reporter that originally broke the Kai story, who seems to be the only person that Kai still talks to. We also hear from the variety of people in the entertainment business that wanted to make Kai a superstar. People that wanted to give him a reality show or booked him for talk shows or just wanted a piece of the viral Kai cake.

While all of this is interesting in a way, it does feel like we don’t get to know Kai as a person. We only get to see him through the lenses of these people that wanted something from him. Jessob Reisbeck, the original reporter that broke the story, is the only one that doesn’t seem to want something from Kai. The only reason he is involved in the story is he is the only person Kai will talk with so Reisbeck ends up as a sort of go-between for Kai and the rest of the world.

We do hear from Kai’s mother and a friend who knew him in school but both of those stories feel fake. Shirley McGillvary, Kai’s mother, sounds like she is only telling stories that don’t make her look like a terrible mom. But her stories don’t make her look all that good either. I can’t tell if she really abused Kai when he was a child or if she was just overwhelmed by motherhood. As for Kai’s school friend, he barely gives us any backstory about Kai’s childhood. He was only there to throw his two cents into a Netflix documentary.

Overall, I thought The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker did a decent job of telling the story of Kai. However, without talking to Kai himself, it’s difficult to tell how much of the documentary is true. If it isn’t on film, it very well may be a lie. A lot of people seemed to want a piece of Kai and that makes me feel bad for him. Not bad enough to believe that he didn’t murder Joseph Galfy in May 2013. But it is possible that Kai was attacked like he claims. Everyone seemed to want a piece of him at the time and that just sucks.

Death In The Dorms | Series Review

After watching so many movies in the last quarter of the year, I often don’t feel like watching very many movies in January. So I end up turning to true crime series and documentaries. Death In The Dorms showed up just in time.

Death In The Dorms is a 6-episode mini-series. Each episode tells the story of a college student murdered on or near their college campus.

While this series does hit a little close to home (my daughter is currently a college junior), I thought it did a good job of telling each student’s story. Unlike most true crime documentaries that focus on the killer, this series features the family and friends of the victims. Yes, we do still hear about the crime and how the murderer was caught but we hear more about how each student lived and how much they are missed.

I know that hearing the sordid details of the crime and the terrible history of the killer tends to get shows higher ratings. However, I think that the format Death In The Dorms uses should be the blueprint for future true crime documentaries. Let’s focus on the victims and their lives instead of glorifying the evil monsters that took those lives from them. Maybe people will be less willing to do terrible things if we stop plastering the bad guy’s name all over the place.

Beanie Mania | Movie Review

Since I work from home, I tend to turn on documentaries as background noise. Sometimes they are true crime documentaries but usually I pick something where I’m already familiar with the subject. That way I can easily pick the thread back up if I can’t listen too closely. Unfortunately, I am all too familiar with the Beanie Baby craze.

Beanie Mania is the story of Beanie Babies as told by collectors and former Ty employees. The bean-filled animals went from another plushie in the store to an absolute frenzy where adults would travel to neighboring states just to get a particular doll. Yes, it was as crazy as it sounds.

Like most people in the 1990s, I owned Beanie Babies. I wouldn’t say I was an avid collector but I did have most of the cats before they went out of fashion. Then, toward the end of the craze, I worked at a store that sold them. I never had to deal with adults calling every day looking for certain dolls or people getting too out of hand in the store. So I was definitely interested in seeing what the documentary had to say about how everything went down.

Sadly for me, the movie didn’t reveal any new information. Since the documentarians were unable to get an interview with Ty Warner himself, they had to rely on stories from the more widely known collectors. The people who started websites or wrote books about the dolls. If you lived through that time and were lucky enough to have access to the internet (the internet was still pretty young at the time), you probably knew these people or read all of this material already. That means the target audience must be young adults, right?

Well, my 19-year old daughter watched part of Beanie Mania with me. I think she got bored of it because she left about 2/3 of the way through the movie. She didn’t even stay long enough to see the only person she would know (Colleen Ballinger, also known as Miranda Sings on YouTube). To be honest, my daughter liked the McMillions documentary about the big McDonald Monopoly game scandal. Beanie Mania just didn’t have an oomph to it.

If you are thinking about watching it, do it for the nostalgia factor. Especially if you are already familiar with Beanie Babies. However, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, you might find it interesting. Just be prepared to turn it off halfway through if get bored. I really wish the documentarians were able to find more interesting people to talk to. Or at least find some more dirt to talk about. The scandals are what makes people stay til the end.

LuLaRich - Reviewing The Amazon Docuseries

Halloween reviews start on October 1!

Unless you have been living under a rock, I’m sure you have heard of LuLaRoe. You know, those are the “buttery soft” leggings that “fashionable” moms everywhere wear. The company skyrocketed to popularity only to fall from grace amid scandal. Well, the people that brought us the Hulu documentary, Fyre Fraud, have given us LuLaRich, a four-part docuseries on Amazon Prime, to show us all the gritty details behind the shady company.

In case you aren’t aware of the issues surrounding LuLaRoe, here is a not-so-quick synopsis. The company started with DeAnne Brady selling maxi skirts, that she sewed at home, out of the trunk of her car. When she became overloaded with sales, she recruited some of her friends to help sell the clothes. As the company grew, more consultants signed on and the company began to form a tiered (or may I say, pyramid) ranking of these consultants. The top tiers would make a commission based on the sales of their lower tiers and so on. (Obviously the bottom tier didn’t have commissions as there was no tier under them.) Those top tiers would rake in tens of thousands of dollars per month. I believe some of the top tier consultants got monthly checks for $70,000 or more. While multi-level marketing (MLMs) are not illegal, pyramid schemes are. And this, my friends, is a pyramid scheme.

The issues really started when LuLaRoe had more consultants than an area could handle. It became difficult for consultants to sell their products because there was so much competition. In addition, the quality of the clothing started to go down. Leggings, their highest selling product by far, would arrive smelling bad or have holds in them or the patterns were sewn badly, resulting in the infamous Tower of Pisa leggings or other almost-x-rated patterns.

Eventually, consultants began leaving en masse. LuLaRoe, in an attempt to keep all of their profits, refused to honor the 100% refund they promised their consultants. Bring on the lawsuits!

How does the docuseries do telling this story? Eh. If you already know the story of the company, the series will probably bore you. There are some interviews with Brady and her husband, Mark Stidham, as well as some former employees. We haven’t heard a lot from the people involved with the actual corporation. Those parts are interesting. However, there are a lot of interviews with the very vocal consultants that were in the top tiers before they left the company. I would have preferred to hear more from the people in the lower tiers that lost everything and barely made any money. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who raked in tens of thousands of dollars each month on the backs of other people’s work then sob when their expensive sports cars are repossessed.

Each episode is roughly 45 minutes. If you are interesting in hearing more about the terrible things DeAnne and the company did (trust me, I only scratched the surface), it is worth the watch. However, if you are already familiar with the basics of the story, you would probably do better watching the video Vice put out in 2019.

Otaku Unite!

This is way old. I premiered this back in 2003, when I was running a small anime festival. It was pretty good back then. Maybe I should dig it out to watch it again to see what I think of it now.