Welcome To DirkFlix!

UPDATED 4/1/2025: Completely revised the When To See scale to reflect the extinction of rental stores and 2nd run dollar show theaters in today's streaming world. The original version of this can be visited here.
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Oh, fercryingoutloud! ANOTHER movie review blog?!? Another guy who thinks his opinion matters and wishes to inflict it on the overloaded Information Superhighway? (What ever happened to that buzzword? Haven't heard it in ages.) Why should we care?

A: Yes, yes, and why not?

The purpose of this blog when started after seeing Avatar in 2009 was to allow me to get back into the habit of reviewing movies and DVDs like I used to between 2004-2008 for IGN and The Digital Bits before life stuff and editorial differences ended those associations.

 Initially intended to not be 1000-2000 word chin-stroking epics, but mostly a few paragraphs about what I've been watching and whether they might be of interest to you, I unfortunately got slack about actually writing anything. While I logged and scored everything I've seen, I didn't write reviews in a timely manner and after a while and a dozen intervening movies, I couldn't remember enough specifics to properly review them, so they remained unpublished.

Since fixing hundreds of unwritten reviews is impossible, I've dedicated myself to knuckling down this year (2025), and as of this revised update only a few reviews need to be finished off out of over 40 this year. I may also go back and start publishing older reviews, even if they're just scores; perhaps adding a sentence or two. Use the hashtag options and search box to see if I saw something in particular.

With movies even more outrageously expensive and even an all-you-can eat service like Netflix and Amazon Prime can still cost you time (which is worth more than money because you can't make more of it), I give movies a numerical score (wow! original!) and how urgently it is for you to see it. Since the Hot Fad Plague of 2020-2022 completely upended going to the movies and everyone and their dog started subscription streaming services (as well as good old cable for Boomers), I have radically revised the When To See scale from six to basically three points:

 1. Pay full/matinee price to see it at a theater. Pretty self-explanatory. The rare times I now go see a movie theatrically, I'll rate whether it's worth going to the show and how much you should pay.

2. Catch it on cable/streaming. This is the most common recommendation now because I see the overwhelming majority of movies at home, but also not every movie needs the theatrical experience. Whether you choose to wait for it to come to your streamer/cable channel of choice, rent or buy it digitally, or hoist the black flag to obtain it, is up to your budget and/or morals. Movies with this ranking are worth your time.

3. Skip it. Even for free, life's too short to waste on bad movies.

For Blu-ray/DVD reviews, I'll recommend whether they're worth buying since there's no rental options anymore now that Redbox has joined Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, Family Video in oblivion. The quantity and quality of extras or the audio-visual quality factor heavily here.

As always, these reviews are just one lifelong movie fans opinions, except that unlike other critics & fans, mine is the only opinion that matters and all reviews are 100% correct in their judgements. If you disagree, that's fine, but understand that you are incorrect in your opinion. ;-)

 Enough of my yakking, let's review some movies!

"The Widower: 'Til Death Do Us Part" Review

 While Netflix has really fallen off due to every studio yanking back their content for their own services, they've managed to remain pretty steady on the true crime documentary front and their latest, The Widower: 'Til Death Do Us Part, is more of the same, though that's a good thing.

It's the story of Thomas Randolph, who came home with his wife, Sharon, in May 2008 to find, according to him, a handyman they'd hired, Michael Miller, robbing their home and when they interrupted his burgling he shot Sharon. Anderson then got a gun and shot Miller dead. What seemed to be an open and shut case of self-defense didn't sit right with Las Vegas Police Detective Dean O'Kelley. If Miller broke in the back door, why didn't he just flee that way when the couple came home instead of trying to exit via the front? Why was his ski mask beside his body when Randolph said he was wearing it? Why were all the shell casings in the garage when Randolph said he fired from inside the house?

Enter Dateline NBC producer Dan Slepian, who was tipped by LVPD contacts whom he'd worked with in the past, and decided to go see what was going on with this case and was given unprecedented access to follow and tape the detectives as they dug into the case. Randolph, they discovered had been married six times over a 33 year span and that four of his wives were now dead, including Sharon. This leads the detectives and Slepian to fly all over the country interviewing family members and surviving ex-wives to piece together a portrait of a cocky charmer who somehow got a lot of ladies to swoon for him. He'd load them up with life insurance then begin grooming others to kill them.

All along Slepian taped many interviews with Randolph in an attempt to figure out what made this guy tick and how he managed to manipulate people and the legal system himself to delay or avoid accountability. Slepian had done many pieces about those wrongly convicted, but here was a guy who the system couldn't seem to nail.

Director Chris Smith (Tiger King) has a wealth of Slepian's footage to work with and he keeps the knotty narrative understandable, but left some nagging questions like what happened to all the insurance and legal settlement money Randolph was collecting (he was living with his weird mother in Utah when arrested) or some of the forensics details. This was probably in order to hold the running time for this tale which transpired over 15 years(!) to a tidy 90 minutes, but it would've been nice to have some more details.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on Netflix.