Most religious cults ultimately boil down to a simple story of the founder's desire for money, control, and sex, and the story of Susan and Tony Alamo is no different. In some senses Susan seems to have been the more interesting figure; in the begining, she was the charistmatic (and scary) figure supposedly blessed by God; husband Tony, by contrast, was just the low-rent hustler who took over when she died, eventually deteriorating into an archetypal dirty old man. The complete absence of the idealism that, however misplaced, you often find in such tales makes this a one-dimensional series, and the production doesn't help, with plenty of weak reconstructions, intrustive music, and witness interviews too full of sound bites. Nonetheless, the story remains as compelling as it is horrific, even if it could have been told with a little more class.
