Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan

When I discovered this one on Netflix, I thought it would be really interesting. The idea of somebody that had multiple personalities being culpable for a crime and how they dealt with it seems like a really interesting story and it was fascinating to watch and try to determine whether this was somebody with multiple personalities or somebody with a very dedicated and clever cover story. Would you really be committed for 10 years in a mental institution and be studied every day over just going to jail? I still feel undecided either way.

However what really let this production down was how it was put together. There was an actor that had been used for reconstructions that looked similar to Billy Milligan at the time of the crimes and in between interviews with family members and people that worked with Billy, there were constant cutaway scenes that were in and out of focus, zooming in and out and spliced together just to look very erratic.

They were also newspaper articles for things being highlighted or underlined quickly I'm just in general it was a little bit garbled and actually distracted you quite a lot from the storyline. There was also for some reason this really melancholy cowboy influenced country music in the background and it quite honestly reminded me of playing something like red dead redemption. I didn't really feel that the music was relevant to Billy Milligan. Normally crime documentaries like this I am absolutely captivated by but with this particular one I found myself losing interest in drifting onto my phone instead without really losing any of the storyline.

I have to admit that I got to episode 3 and by that point I'd had enough of trying to follow the storyline with all of the cutaway scenes and the cheesy effects so I remove the series from my watchlist and went in researched it myself online.

The story itself is very interesting and the archive footage of Billy being interviewed under several "personas" were fascinating to watch but apart from that, I don't feel that this really did justice to telling his story and was let down by all of the irritating cut scenes.

I haven't finished this series yet but it must be said... I'm DISTRACTED from the story being told by whomever is the locations manager for the interviews. These places are tight and off putting. I'm not interested in what's being said because I'm trying to understand who put this attorney in a bank vault? Or these doctors in RANDOM jail cell settings? Or a Church!? You're taken away from the story and distracted by the settings because of 1. The actual setting itself and horrible lighting 2. The way in which a camera is allowed to setup in that right setting. One doctor looked as though she was a hundred feet away stuffed between two grills!?! It's insane and TERRIBLE!

I'm sorry to say but I'm not sure the director of this documentary know what he is doing. The scenarios where the various actors are interviewed are hilarious out of place: inside a safe? Between two shelves? In a cell? Along some corridors? The editing is confusing, musics excessive.

The story is interesting but very poorly told.

Director Olivier Megaton, known for his overly stylistic film-making, offers a tiring, troublesome, and nauseating take on infamous criminal Billy Milligan, who was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. The material could have been a lot crisper - at most, a two-part documentary instead of four. There are too many interviews taking place at weird locations, a lot of shaky cam, flashy cuts, and a background score that rarely appears aligned with the stuff we're watching. I was left weary by the time the series ended, not caring what anybody had to say about Milligan - he could've been suffering from DID. Still, he committed some very heinous crimes (including rape and murder) that the justice system at the time was willing to be lenient on.

The first couple of episodes carry all the informational weight; the rest feel like random people giving random opinions on Milligan's cases and their aftermath. The interviews with Billy's siblings were clearly the most eye-opening amongst the lot. All the journalists, cops, attorneys, and mental health specialists seemed to take way too much time trying to opine what they believed in. This, in turn, sensationalized Billy's life and, in turn, lessened that of his victims' - the self-centered, narcissistic Billy (now dead) would have loved seeing this documentary himself. The popularity this guy got to the point of James Cameron deciding to make a film on him, alongside his escapades in Hollywood and Las Vegas, are downright ludicrous.

Director Megaton isn't the best choice for a subject like this. His is a very rapid, too-much-happening, cue-glitchy-transitions style of making that felt out of place. He seems fixated on how offbeat he can make the film look, much less on its core emotions. I had to take pauses while watching this - either the material became almost filler-like, or the horrible editing left my eyes sore. Netflix usually does a good-to-great job in the department of true crime content, but Monsters Inside isn't something that I'd recommend to anyone.

I watched this and was very disappointed at how little they talked about the victims of this "person" It centered on making Billy the victim, trying to gather sympathy for him, and all the while the real victims are largely forgotten.