20130927: Documentary Review--Afterlife Investigations

The Afterlife Investigations

1. Fundamentals
1. American live action documentary, 2008, NR, 72 minutes.
2. IMDB: 7.8/10.0 from 5 users.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: no website entries.
4. Directed, produced, and written by: Tim Coleman
5. Narration: Donal MacIntyre.
6. Watched on Hulu+; to add insult to injury, there were commercials with this piece of nonsense.


2. Setup and Plot
1. Absolute bovine scatology.


2. Mediums in Scotland, the Scole group.  Physical mediumship...knocking on tables, disappearances.  All the usual lies.  Always in near darkness, often in some foreign language.  What a crock.  The 'actual video' and photographs were ridiculously poor and meaningless.


3. Time spent in Italy with Marcello Bacci, a guy who has a vacuum-tube radio through which the spirits speak.  The Scole group get a few answers in English.  Supposedly Italian scientists have verified that, in a particular case, the voice heard over the radio match the same voice recorded before the spirit's death.  So, they tried this with the radio in a Faraday cage (no signals coming in), with the radio turned off, with the vacuum tubes removed.  Still the voices came through.  That makes the show all the less convincing.


4. Return to the Scole Hole.  Some 'actual video and audio' looks and sounds just terrible.  The SPR (Society for Psychical Research) vetted the phenomena in the Scole Hole.  Of course they did; that is why they were brought in.  Nothing new.


5. Apports--goodness; material objects just teleport in from other places and times, and bang on tables.  Cliche.


6. Italy again--low light, out of focus, levitation.  Sure, cliche.  Apported objects showed in Italy as well.


7. Scole--floating, disembodied hand.  Cliche.  Again.


8. The 'incredible' images shown were blurs for the most part.  Another group of images consisted of writing in languages the mediums supposedly did not know.  The assurance that the films were not tampered with were totally unconvincing.


9. Next came video recordings.  Ah, nice, new material for the spiritualists.  However, the old enabling rules are still there...swap out film, swap out memory chips, whatever.  The spirit video was just nonsense again.


10. Audio--the evidence is right up there with 'Paul is dead.'


11. 25 minutes left; the Scole Report came out in 1999, whitewashing the efforts.


12. Jump to 2006; the The Skeptic magazine's editor Chris French (PhD in psychology) was unconvinced.


13. Visits to the US: tried to repeat the Scole phenomena.  Levitating table with crystals on top that do not fall off during various rotations.  The light show was quite a bit like the one in Scotland.  Well, this was done near Hollywood.  'Voices were projected from high up in the room' and no one could do that.  Oh, really?


14. One of the SPR investigators, Montague Kean, died before 2010.  They asked the real life Alison DuBois to contact Kean via his widow, Veronica.  Supposedly Kean is interested in talking to the living to help bridge the gap.


3. Conclusions
1. The point of the film seems to be to accept all the old cliches, plus a few new lies--this is the mark of a mockumentary.
2. This is not to be confused with 'Investigating the Afterlife' from 2008, which looked marginally better.
3. One line summary: Another disgusting fake.
4. One star of five; four blackholes for sound, acting, screenplay, and SFX.
5. The Scole experiment ended in 1998.  Bacci still entertains a small audience in Italy.  What was the point in dredging all this nonsense up again in 2010?


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 3/10 Where do I begin?  Bad focus, poor lighting, unrecognizable images.  Bad SFX passed off as real events.


2. Sound: 2/10 Terrible.  Lots of undecipherable noise purported to be messages from beyond the grave.  Also, we have voices and lips being out of sync.  The narrator lisps.  Stupid incidental music.


3. Acting: 0/10 Supposed to be a documentary; instead, is a totally unbelievable mockumentary.


4. Screenplay: 0/10 This feels like spiritualism 101.  The frauds are reported as facts one after another.  Nice.  I suppose a total newcomer to the subject would think of all this as interesting.  The overall effect is, "let's screw over all the next ignorant generation," with many of the same tricks and tomfoolery as used since 1890.  "Can't be explained by physical laws" gets used over and over again.  I'm not a professional skeptic, but I could explain a few of these.  I've seen the lies and the explanations before.  Hardcore skeptics could wipe out every lie in this charade.


5. SFX: 0/10 Absolutely terrible. Dull, repetitive (some images 15 times or so), unconvincing, often ridiculous.