Who Done It: The Clue Documentary

This is a well-made and comprehensive look at the cult classic Clue: The Movie (1985) which has been my favorite movie since I was a kid. And they talk about that, calling Clue a "babysitter movie" and how one actor showed it to his own kids on VHS, along with showcasing the younger adults who have elevated Clue from a box office bomb that generated a post-theater following to a real cult film.

It's a good doc but not great, probably because this documentary didn't get made until 2022 since several participants ranging from actors to producers have long since passed away. This production probably should have been made around 2005 and yet there's the longer view and additional information in retrospect that supports the main interviews.

Video is overly compressed, audio sounds like they used a $10 temu microphone, compressed the audio mix, then compressed the whole movie again so they could make it fit on a cheap thumb drive for distribution.

I mean pirated movies shot over someone's shoulder in a theater on a handheld VHS camcorder that you could buy on the street in any major city were more watchable than this. We bailed out after suffering through 10 minutes waiting for it to get better. We were hoping they were doing a schtick and it would jump to a nice smooth & crisp image with clear audio, but if they did that, it happened too late.

The best part of the doc are the interviews from the cast. Unfortunately, they are surface level and way too few for the length of the film. So much time is spent on where we saw the actors before this, the score, the record labels that decades later decided to produce/distrubute the soundtrack, fan reinactments/thoughts, that we never get any detail about what filming was actually like, no behind the scenes footage or stories other than they all loved each other. Weirdly, when they mention that Lee Ving's voice was dubbed in the movie by an uncredited actor no one says why that was - little things like that which could have been more interesting were left out.

Overall too much emphasis on the peripheral and none on the filming of the movie. Of course many of the cast are no longer with us, but others apparently just didn't want to be involved. Overall it was a nice idea but pretty boring, unfortunately.

I'm such a huge Clue fan, I really did love most of the interviews with people directly involved with the film. I wish there had been a couple more interviews like that with cast/crew members vs. Convention clips. Overall it needed a tighter edit, even with the existing interviews.

The second half really started to wander, and I think that is where the film struggles with its identity. Some of it is very much a documentary, but other parts are more of a vlog or compilation of the cult impact. It should have focused on being one thing. I think it would have been wonderful to have short clips of fans quoting their favorite lines or saying what so inspired them running underneath the closing credits. But too much time was dedicated to interviewing content creators I've never heard of, soundtrack companies, or the filmmaker reading from the Clue storybook at the end which was unnecessary. It felt like filler.

So I'll give it a decent rating for the interview content it did provide, but it needed more focus and better editing to be the kind of documentary I wanted for Clue.

I remember going to the theater with my closest friends to watch Clue. We all agreed that it was a a good movie but we wanted more. We thought it could have been better. The cast was superb.

But, this documentary ...while it does give interesting information about the making of the movie, it was presented in such a boring manner that I quickly find myself falling asleep. The interviews were at times very long and lacking in depth and substance.

Although this documentary was made in 2022, the quality is so low it looks and sounds like it is from the 80's. I understand it might be the director's first project, and yeah...it shows.

I got up to grab a snack and hit pause. When I noticed it wasn't even halfway through, I decided to cut my losses and switch to something else.