222. Web-series Reviews – 69

More web-series reviews…

What Remains – Came out in 2013.  4 part mini-series.  A young couple move into an apartment only to find the body of a young woman that had been missing for 2 years but never registered as missing which leads to a deeper investigation into what actually happened

One of the reviews from IMDB...

This four-part thriller shown on the BBC on consecutive Sundays turned out to be an excursion into modern-day Gothic melodrama mixed in with a good old-fashioned whodunit. Along the way it tries to make points about neighbourliness, loneliness and control as all of the inhabitants of a small block of flats conveniently seem to forget about the existence of the young, fat, solitary female who lived in the top-floor flat until two years after her disappearance, her bodily remains are discovered in the loft above her apartment, triggering the narrative.

Cue red-herrings galore and a backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards use of flashback to fill in the lead-up to the slain girl's demise. The viewer is kept guessing as to who the actual perpetrator is with a veritable procession of possible candidates paraded before us, including a seedy old teacher and the mysterious young woman he keeps in his flat, a pair of lesbians, one nasty and dominating, the other humane but servile, a careworn divorcée male newspaper editor, his reporter girlfriend and surly, hormonal teenage son, who are all joined by a young couple, him a feckless jack-the-lad, her a good-natured Indian girl, heavily pregnant, who move into the flat below the dead girl's and who actually make the grisly discovery.

Brought into investigate the death is crusty old soon-to-retire police detective David Threlfall, another Mr Lonely himself, who seems to relate to the dead girl so much that he pursues the case even after his last day on the job (and after his former colleagues have all moved on to their next cases) to the extent of staying overnight in her long abandoned flat, indeed for the epilogue we see him actually living there. He hits it off with the young mum-to-be and together they try to solve the mystery, indeed they are, along with the girl reporter, the only halfway decent people in the whole cast, the rest being an unappealing mixture of the venal, duplicitous, vindictive and just plain mean. For me this made it hard to relate to the bulk of the characters and stretched credibility to breaking point, I mean just how many horrible people can you fit into a block of flats at the same time?

Anyway, it winds its way to an over-the-the-top gory ending, with more than one dumb way to die along the way. Somewhere in it all is probably a moral about looking out for your neighbours, but along the road, the writer and director seemingly got consumed by some mystical Gothic bug and decided to try and whip up a kind of "I Know What You Did In the Loft" finale. It's reasonably well acted, although I'm tiring a little of Stephen MacKintosh's pained look in every character he portrays but on the whole this was an okay, if very incredible, whodunit, whydunit and howdunit which at least had me stumped up until the end.

My Take – Worth a watch!

 

The next 3 web-series are true stories😊!!

See No Evil: The Moors Murders – Came out in 2006. A 3-part mini-series. A vivid drama which documents the notorious Moors murderers; Ian Brady and Myra Hindley.

1965:- Following the cot death of their baby daughter, young marrieds Maureen and David Smith are comforted and ultimately influenced by Maureen's older sister Myra Hindley and her boyfriend Ian Brady but David is horrified to witness Brady murder teen-ager Edward Evans and goes to the police, as a result of which Brady is arrested. The police investigation links Brady and Hindley to the disappearance of several local children, especially when a pornographic photo of 10-year old Lesley Ann Downey is found, along with a tape of her pleading for her life. The bodies of Lesley and John Kilbride are discovered in shallow graves on Saddleworth moor and Brady and Hindley are tried for murder, receiving multiple life sentences, though David is exonerated despite the pair trying to implicate him and it will be some years before the murderers confess to the whereabouts of other victims. Five years later the Smiths have separated and Maureen is persuaded by her grandma to visit Myra, who has now embraced religion and says that she will always be haunted by her crimes. David is annoyed that his wife made the visit but Maureen tells him she believes her sister has genuinely changed and the pair reconcile for their children's sake. An end title explains the fates of the four main protagonists as well as paying tribute to the victims.

One of the reviews from IMDB...

To mark the 40th anniversary of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley's convictions for the horrific 'Moors Murders', ITV1 has produced this dramatization of their hunt, capture and conviction, charting their friendship with Dave Smith (Michael McNulty), boyfriend of Hindley's sister, whom Brady tried to warp into his twisted little world. It was only when he saw Brady butchering 17 year old Edward Evans to death that it all came out and the pair were caught.

People reacted to this production with the expected mixed emotions. It was always going to be one of the most controversial productions the station had ever green-lighted, and there was understandable out-rage, offense and shock from some when it went ahead. But the families of the victims were okay with it and this drama does manage to be as realistic yet sensitive as it could possibly be.

This can hardly be described as 'entertaining', but by telling the dark true story that it is, it does play out with the required haunting gusto, with some dark camera shots and a few quiet, reflective scenes.

Performances wise, Sean Harris and Maxine Peake as the two main characters are highly effective, as are some of the supporting cast including George Costigan as the detective who lead the investigation that brought the pair to justice. Some of the others might need to brush up on their craft a bit, but they do not stop what is generally a well-made and very effective timely re-telling of events nobody wanted to know but had to hear.

My Take – A worthwhile watch.

 

The Moorside – A two-part drama about the search for missing Yorkshire schoolgirl Shannon Matthews in 2008. Based on real events, this powerful story of friendship, trust, and forgiveness takes us to the heart of a community rocked by a child's disappearance. In 2008, 9-year-old Shannon Matthews is reported missing. A frantic search follows and quickly becomes a murder inquiry. Led by Julie Bushby, the community rallies around Shannon's grief-stricken mother Karen, determined to find her daughter and show that although she's from a poor background, Shannon's life is as important as any other. As hope fades and doubts about Karen arise, Shannon is found - with a man her mother knows. As suspicions deepen, Karen's friends set about discovering the truth.

One of the reviews from IMDB...

A dramatisation of the real life tale of Shannon Matthews, a nine year old girl from the Dewsbury area of Yorkshire, who went missing for a short while in early 2008, and sparked a nationwide appeal for her safe return (but received substantially less coverage than Madeleine McCann, from a more affluent background...but who's never been found.) Julie Bushby (Sheridan Smith), a close friend of Shannon's wayward mother Karen (Gemma Whelan), spearheaded the local community into action, and all the local residents turned out to look for Shannon in a unified show of solidarity, while Karen's behaviour was just disinterested and odd. Eventually, in what appeared to be a rare happy ending for this type of case, Shannon was found...but the truth, in it's own way, was as earth shattering as if she hadn't, when it was discovered Shannon had been abducted by her own mother and her friend Michael Donavan (Sam Chapman), while her current partner Craig Meehan (Tom Hansen) was arrested for possessing child pornography.

There are many who subscribe to the mediums of film and television, strictly as a means of escapism, to retreat into a world of fantasy, with limitless possibilities and an almost certainly predetermined happy ending. There is not much interest, from these people, in seeing re-enactments of tales constrained by the boundaries of real life, even happy tales, played out with all the grubby, unavoidable trappings of reality. A tale set somewhere like Dewsbury Moor, a place that perfectly encapsulates the gritty, unglamorous surroundings/way of life that are probably the norm for a no doubt many unidentified number among us. In bringing this dramatisation to the screen. director Paul Whittington has shoved this bleak landscape straight in our face and left us to witness the car crash that proceeded.

In what appears to be the most meagre common ground with a fantasy film as opposed to the hard, brutal depiction of reality that it is, the lead character is the good guy, or certainly the person with the most noble intentions, even at the expense of not really being the main antagonist of the story. In this role, as the bright, bubbly spark of flickering decency in a sea of relentlessly, depressingly immoral, grubby people, Sheridan Smith truly exemplifies what a terrific actress she is, demonstrating her ability to transform and really immerse herself into any role she's doing, and really bringing the character of Julie Bushby to life like no other. The supporting performers are also strikingly accurate, but it is truly her who steals the show.

The dichotomy of Matthews is simply as a figure who took dysfunctional to a whole new level, who skipped her appearance on The Jeremy Kyle Show and gained public notoriety in a different, far more shocking way. The Daily Mail/Tory Party would probably have you believe she's symptomatic of hundreds of others across the country, and while that's most likely very debatable, this is still a well made and hauntingly accurate portrayal, spread out over two series, of a case that'll probably never be forgotten.

My Take – A worthwhile watch!

 

The 3 Girls – Came out in 2017. Based on three young girls who were groomed, sexually abused and trafficked by a group of men in Rochdale and of the failure of the authorities to do anything about it.

One of the reviews from IMDB...

In the Yorkshire town of Rochdale, a series of girls with chaotic home lives were sexually abused over a number of years by a group of Pakistani men who operated from a takeaway store in the city, but were never challenged by those in authority for fear of being branded racist. Despite years of concerns being raised by many, including health care worker Sara Rowbotham (Maxine Peake), a series of institutional failings by police, social workers and local authorities led to the perpetrators being allowed to get away with it for years, even with one trial collapsing due to lack of evidence, before a successful trial went ahead.

In order to achieve the fairly cohesive multicultural society we live in today, many laws were passed in order to prevent discrimination and prejudice based on religious, racial, cultural and ethnic backgrounds, which were pretty successful in their aims and formed a defensive, concrete wall around those who held on to such negative attitudes and their freedom to employ them in any capacity. But while they worked well to eliminate much of the racism around, there have been instances where these new mind sets were terribly subverted, especially by those in charge, where the protective wall of anti racism was abused by those it was meant to protect, never more horrifically than in Rochdale and several other Yorkshire towns, which this drama delves into.

I happened to tune in to The Big Question last Sunday morning, and one of the topics that came up was the inexplicable question of whether white people could ever be victims of racism? Certain (non white, funnily enough) audience members had some pretty jaw dropping reasons why they couldn't, but this case certainly served to raise the bar on the issue, with these poor, emotionally neglected, not terribly well-educated young girls being targeted for what appeared to be cultural reasons by large groups of Asian men, who saw them as inferior because of the way they behaved and their apparent lack of values. Surely this serves to challenge this mind set.

The portrayal of the girls by the young actresses involved is highly convincing and well done, even if they are perhaps inevitably out shined by established actress Peake, and in more background roles those depicting the predatory attackers also do well. There is a not terribly subtle nod to the 2015 Hollywood drama Spotlight when the full scale and amount of towns where the abuse took place is revealed.

My Take – A worthwhile watch.

Cheers till next time😊!!

Daffy Definition

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