TheFearmakers

Here's yet another Netflix documentary with four parts that should have been two, as there's simply too much time spent on interviews with particular people suing Sean Combs...

Each episode has at least one or two people being interviewed about a lawsuit and what led up to the lawsuit...

The problem is, these long stretches of repetitive allegations simply gets in the way of an otherwise intriguing documentary about the rise of a supposed music icon who's definitely a music mogul...

It's one thing to have a frame story that, in this case, is self-shot footage of Combs in the nervous days leading up to his arrest: But there are multiple frames here and there needed only that one...

The most interesting episode is the third, after piggybacking on what seems more a Suge Knight/Tupac biopic... when Puffy rises as a contrived phoenix from the ashes of his biggest act, Notorious BIG, meets Cassie Ventura, and begins a downward drug-fueled spiral...

But then we're tortured with twenty-minutes of more allegations... from a male "sex worker" (who's not very attractive) saying (without proof) that he slept with Cassie AND Diddy, which segues into a studio musician in the final episode accusing him of rape...

All these bulwarks might be important on paper since the court case is the elephant in the room, but they simply ruin the overall flow here as a documentary with way too many cooks and conspiracies.

In the James Cagney film noir KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE, full-lipped, flirtatious beauty Helena Carter was who Cagney was interested in even though he had a woman at home... while the opposite occurs here as her rich girl character's smitten with (and is quickly married to) gentle giant workingman Rod Cameron, despite his attraction to first-billed beauty Yvonne De Carlo...

Who owns the titular RIVER LADY river boat, personally managed by her scoundrel gambler cohort Dan Duryea... after giving Rod Cameron full control of a fledgling lumber mill: the main story that should have been secondary given Duryea's usual penchant for villains, needing far more screen-time throughout an otherwise semi-effective Western/Romance Technicolor Melodrama.

In BEAT GIRL, Christopher Lee played a sleazy nightclub owner where his even more slimy manager berated girls into becoming strippers... and here the always-intense Nigel Green is in opposite camps of Lee's titular FACE OF FU MANCHU: the one and only time as Sax Rohmer's Scotland Yard Inspector Nayland Smith...

Later replaced by a more classy and dignified Douglas Wilmer, Green's the first and overall best lawman/adversary since he really seems to completely detest Asian mastermind/super-criminal Fu Manchu...

Where Christopher Lee kidnaps a scientist to transform a deadly black poppy to poison England's gigantic Thames River... which is soon a double-kidnapping as the scientist's beautiful daughter Karin Dor is also held hostage...

Making the first half the most intriguing before the investigation drags with too much expository dialogue and not enough of the initial James Bond franchise style fights... that Nigel Green and his Watson-like sidekick Howard Marion-Crawford passively experience through muscularly resilient German gent Joachim Fuchsberger...

Taking away from Nigel's central hero, and, somewhat resembling Lee's Hammer adversary Peter Cushing, he has the fervency of a cornered cat... while Fu Manchu's gorgeously ferocious Asian daughter Tsai Chin complains to daddy about not having enough to do...

Which occurs in the next, and overall best of the franchise, BRIDES OF FU MANCHU, where the hypnotizing of beautiful starlets is the focal-point compared to this more cerebral, handsomely-produced science-fiction-crime-thriller that hasn't enough chills for the stakes that are ultimately raised.