Alcatraz Prison Escape: Deathbed Confession

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.

Whoever did the production music needs to find a new line of work. Good luck deciphering what the hell they are saying because of that idiot producer that has the thought it was a good idea to crank the background music twice the volume of the voices. My Gods it's unwatchable.

Good luck hearing the narration on this documentary. Subject matter was interesting, but whoever did the sound should've been fired. Can barely hear the voices over the music and sound effects.

Danny Trejo's narration goes to waste. The dramatic, canned, pulsing background music is overly loud. And it's quite unnecessary. A waste of what would have been a good doc'.

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.