Alcatraz Prison Escape: Deathbed Confession

If they did watch it, they would have the same trouble everyone else has: YOU CAN'T HEAR HALF THE INTERVIEW CONTENT BECAUSE THE MUSIC DROWNS IT OUT. Dishonest filmmaking for other reasons, e.g. Floating yet another sea story about this event, but this event and not helped by sub-moronic statements like "the rock has not revealed all it knows and all it doesn't know" -- like what isn't known can be revealed. The irony here perhaps is that a good fictional thriller probably could have been made of the material they were attempting to sell as fact, but perhaps that is more work than taking a premise and cobbling "supportive" material around it.

I decided to watch this because I'm interested in the history of Alcatraz. It was so hard to watch because the background music is so loud you can hardly hear the narration. I decide that I would turn on the closed captioning so I could read what was being said. The production crew that put this show together needs to be sat down and have their jobs properly explained to them. I ended up just turning the volume down and read the captions. That being said I did find the show interesting .Overall the editing and video quality are sub par and make this show almost unwatchable. If I wasn't interested in Alcatraz I probably would have turned it off.

Alcatraz Prison Escape: Deathbed Confession (2015)

*** (out of 4)

Danny Trejo narrates this documentary that takes a look at what happened to the three convicts who escaped Alcatraz. This story is one of the greatest mysteries in American history and there have been countless theories over the year as to what happened.

This film was released the same year as the slightly better ALCATRAZ: SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH. Both films featured FBI Marshall Arthur D. Roderick who has been on this case for several years now. If you've seen that special then you know what "ending" it gave for the three men who escaped. This documentary gives you a completely different ending so I won't ruin what it is.

For the most part if you're a fan of these types of documentaries then you'll probably enjoy this one. I love certain subjects and Alcatraz is one of them so I will watch just about anything on it. The film manages to hold your attention as we've basically got a man on his deathbed confessing to his role in the escape. Again, I won't ruin what he did or what he claims happened but it is somewhat shocking and certainly much different than what most of these documentaries have shown.

Obviously, the sound quality is terrible and you can read all about that from the other reviews that talk about how the music is so loud you can't hear most of the dialogue, which begs the question if anyone ever previewed it before slapping it onto Amazon video to get some money off of the notoriety of the content. But let's also discuss that the video quality itself looks like it was filmed on an iPhone 4 at best and then edited using some freeware QuickTime conversion software to push it to a Windows Movie Maker or other freeware video editing software. I don't even think they could have used iMovie to edit this as it doesn't even look that professional. It's an interesting theory and story, but it's unentertaining. At one point I saw a very older MacBook Pro model in the documentary and I wished that they had used that to edit the film instead of the DOS or Windows 95 PC that they must have used instead.

What more can I say? Documentary was very interesting and informative but the background music absolutely ruined it. It quite literally gave me a throbbing headache.