Director: Ron Meyer
Released: 2021
Mood: If you’re feeling nostalgic and want to be taken back to the good ol’ days when it was a treat to watch a mediocre educational film in class instead of reading a textbook.
I have NO idea why I decided to watch Becoming Evil: Serial Killers of the Old West instead of putting on a regular Western movie.
I found myself with a couple of free hours, and was scrolling through my saved shows. Apparently at some point this documentary was recommended by Prime, and I marked it for later. I don’t know why ‘later’ was last night, other than the fact that I had little-to-zero energy, and this seemed like easy viewing.
The production quality of Becoming Evil: Serial Killers of the Old West is not particularly good, which I’ll say more about in a bit. But if you’re someone who’s fascinated by the outlaws, gunslingers, and generally reckless miscreants of the Old West, there’s some fun trivia here, provided by genuine experts.
Becoming Evil: Serial Killers of the Old West is an offshoot of the Becoming Evil true crime docuseries that lasted one whole season in 2019. I’ve never seen it. I’m not a true crime junkie, and only have a mild interest in the genre.
When I worked in a public library in my teens and 20s, I would open the true crime books as I shelved them and flip to the photos in the middle to get a little thrill. I learned a bit about the big ones, like Manson, Gacy, BTK, and Bundy (I did watch Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, but admittedly only to see Jim Parsons). I also spent several months in my early 30s listening to the My Favourite Murder podcast on my commute.
All of that is to say, I have no qualifications and you shouldn’t take my opinion on true crime too seriously.
With that said, the subject matter of Becoming Evil: Serial Killers of the Old West is right up my alley as a Western fan! It’s not often that you hear Old West outlaws documented in the sober manner of serial killers.
This show delivers a fairly solid intro to many nefarious characters. Some of them are among the familiar legends who have inspired a gazillion books and movies, like Billy the Kid, Jesse James, John Wesley Hardin, and Boone Helm aka the Kentucky Cannibal. But you also get introduced to quite a few others, criminals who had even higher body counts or committed murder in more grisly ways. Some of the ones included are:
- The Bender family
- James Miller
- Sally Scull
- Robert Clay Allison
- Henry Plummer
- Tom Horn
- Charles Kennedy
- The possibly fictional or at least embellished Joaquín Murieta
- The Servant Girl Annihilator, who was never caught and some people think became Jack the Ripper
Multiple historians, authors, and other experts are interviewed throughout Becoming Evil: Serial Killers of the Old West to provide insights into each killer’s story.
I was already familiar with Bob Boze Bell from True West magazine, and was captivated by many of the others. These people are clearly passionate about what they do, and super engaging. I would love to sit down with literally any of them, grab a beer, and pick their brains. The screen comes alive when they talk, which is what this show desperately needs.
On the downside, the main narration is PAINFULLY cheesy. It feels like it was made to be presented on VHS tape, via a TV mounted on an A/V trolley, to highschool students of a bygone era. It’s slow, dry, and oddly patronizing (maybe that’s just me). Sometimes the narrator inexplicably does accents and female voices, and he does them so badly that you wonder how he got his job.
The reenactments are also weak. It feels like they may have been filmed by a reenactment group, which on its own is super cool. But the production adds this awfully yellow sepia-tone and slow motion effects, and the actors are clearly modern humans and not the criminals we’re hearing about. The documentary doesn’t acknowledge that at all, and kinda tries to play it like these are real videos.
There are a bunch of historic photos of locations, too, but all of them are old photos of towns at a point in which they already had electrical grids, which is annoyingly distracting. I can understand that there weren’t enough era-authentic photos to support a steady visual narrative, unlike documentaries about more modern serial killers, so they had to do SOMETHING. But the overall effect just isn’t it.
Overall, I wasn’t blown away by Becoming Evil: Serial Killers of the Old West, but I did learn some highly enjoyable Old West facts about outlaws. And I do love facts. And outlaws.
