The Death and Resurrection Show

When it's covering Killing Joke's music, or the political/social values of the band's members, or the way their music reflected the times, it's pretty good stuff.

When its covering occult topics, horoscopes, and even things like UFOs (briefly), I couldn't really vibe with it. If all that stuff is integral to the band and its members I understand to some extent, but I don't think the documentary interweaved these fairly extreme themes into a music documentary very effectively or coherently.

So it's a mixed bag. Maybe 2/3s of it was quite good, but I wasn't a fan of the other 1/3, so I did end up feeling its two and a half hour long runtime.

But at the same time, I did like watching a documentary on a band I'm not super familiar with- I've only really listened to Night Time of all their albums. They're definitely an interesting and influential band, and this documentary will probably be great to big Killing Joke fans, and decent to pretty good to non-fans like myself.

The Killing Joke - I never liked it. Just another noisy band with an unpleasant voice. If the voice annoys me, the song pushes the "Ignore!"-button. So my question to this documentary was: Why the hell is The Killing Joke - moderately - famous? It delivers some answers, tells a story of obsession, drama, music press fodder, the power of a strong public image and enigmatic lyrics. My ignorance of The Killing Joke probably worked in my favor, as they didn't tell me anything I did already know. For me this movie was a new and interesting vignette of 20th century pop culture.

The KJs obsession with the occult is a central theme of this documentary. It motivates them, it unites and divides them. But don't let all the mumbo-jumbo about "magic" repel you, just see it as an important plot device - as that it works quite well for this movie.

Aleister Crowley, the embodiment of modern occultism, was a funny guy. Even when he was deadly serious with the things he did, you can look at it all as a very elaborate kind of joke. Therefore it absolutely makes sense that KJ's Singer, Jaz Coleman (another JC), who actually considers himself to be a great magician and a successor of Crowley, stylized himself as a court jester, a joker. It's all a big joke. But it's also real. Placebos are real. Faith can make it real. If somebody takes a placebo, but he is convinced that it's a poison pill, he can actually die. Some jokes can kill you.

Did magic work for the KJs? They sure think it did. Did it work for me? No. I checked out some of their better known titles, but I'm still: You sold your soul for THAT? Seriously, bro, you must be joking!

Yes, this documentary should have been 60 minutes shorter, more concise, more effective. It would have been much better, more attractive to a wider audience. As it is, it will not leave much of an impact outside of Killing Joke's parish. And that's too bad. I'd love to see more documentaries like this, real efforts to tell astonishing tales about unique bands. A documentary about the great Alien Sex Fiend. Or about King Kurt - answering the question: "Does flour work?"

I love Killing Joke, I was so looking forward to this, finally a music documentary on this major, influential and brilliant band. But, it was not to be, the terrible sound mixing is one thing, that alone could have been overcome, maybe, if the documentary had some kind of purpose.

The dialogue was drowned out for most of the film, either by having the music in the background mixed at the same EQ as the voice over, but with the music slightly louder, so it drowns out the dialogue completely. Another issue was having an unnecessary droning sound when contributors were speaking, much of what was said was indecipherable, hence defeating the purpose of the documentary. Definitely the worst sound mixing I have ever heard.

The documentary itself decided to skip the amazing music and concentrate on the blatant, empirically impossible nonsense of the occult. Anyone with a basic understanding of the laws of physics would be irritated by the pretentious twaddle espoused throughout this documentary. It was just like watching a christian rock group talk about their faith based beliefs, boring, irrational nonsense, I didn't expect a religious documentary about one of THE major post-punk bands, all that was interesting about this band was ignored, or if it was talked about, could not be heard because of the appalling sound mixing. The music should have taken priority, and just a brief chat about their religious faith, something that was not a major part of their influential output.

The piece on Jaz Coleman recording classic music, with influences from middle eastern music was very interesting, but again was largely ruined by the terrible sound.

A missed opportunity, it should have been amazing, it wasn't.

I've always thought Killing Joke were a bit special so wanted to see if there was anything worth learning from this documentary.

As it turns out the band have an interesting history, particularly with their Occultism background, and this kind of explains the power and shape of the music.

However 2.5 hours is waaay too long for a rockumentary and there was a lot of waffle it could've done without. As well, it must be a top contender in the worse movie sound awards. Much of the dialogue is drowned in soundtrack or lost in sinister rumble or is just plain badly recorded. There's no excuse for it unless you've only got found footage. Fortunately the music audio was OK. Unfortunately there wasn't enough of it.

The other problem is that if you're not a fan, you're not gonna follow the plot. Assumptions are made that the viewer already knows that A) followed B). And when events unfold via incomprehensible mumbling, well, good luck with that. Between the film's length and the crap audio, I found myself drifting off, because it couldn't make me care about what bloke 1 and bloke 2 were saying.

On the plus side, it was nice to get to know the lads, each of them characters essential to the tale and for the undeniable chemical reaction. A glimpse into the fiery mind of Jaz Coleman was fascinating, although, watching in 2022, the frequent references to 'energy' and such feel dated and a bit cheesy, pinned to that Gen X era . The earnest prophetic 'storm coming' bits at the end made me wonder if Jaz might today be a QAnonner. It's a kind of Magick.

Killing Joke are one of the sharpest and most original British bands ever, so it was definitely worth making a film about them. Maybe a better one than this though.

(The graphics/animation in the closing credits was great though.)

There's some interesting stuff here, mainly from Youth and Big Paul, but the whole thing is badly let down by the worst sound mixing for the interviews I've ever heard. Even with headphones on. it was really difficult to make out most of the time due to terrible initial recording quality (on some of them it sounded like the mic was 10 feet from the interviewee) that's compounded by droning noise and music playing in the background. Also it could easily lose 30 minutes from the 150+ min running time by losing the Icelandic bits which really add nothing. Considering it's taken 12 years to put together, it's really disappointing and I can't understand why they would release something when the interview audio quality is generally so poor. Also, it's not really a Killing Joke doc per se, it's more a Jaz Coleman documentary that includes Killing Joke. Worth a single watch of you are fan but not repeat viewing, not really anything there for non-fans though