Evil Genius: the True Story of America's most diabolical Bank Heist

A true crime mini-series produced by the Duplass brothers, Evil Genius:  the True Story of America's most diabolical Bank Heist (2018, Netflix) is every bit as riveting and addictive as Wild Wild Country.  In fact, the two series complement one another:  Wild Wild Country involves the deluded scions of good families pouring their treasure and enthusiasm into the coffers of a charismatic guru.  In Wild Wild Country, everyone is upscale and the guru's apostles, who are legion, have shiny scrubbed faces and make a fine appearance at the commune's orgies with their trim, lithe, and athletic bodies.  The action takes place in exotic places:  the wilderness of Oregon and an Indian ashram.  The guru's followers build a spick-and-span city in the desert with great, spotless communal halls and neat A-frames on the mountain slopes.  By contrast, Evil Genius is a urvey of a nest of nickel-and-dime criminals located in a decaying rust-belt city, Erie, Pennsylvania.  The shabby streets and alleys and businesses in Erie look like Pittsburgh or Chicago or Manchester, New Hampshire -- everything is completely ordinary:  the action plays out on suburban streets, near McDonald's restaurants and a storefront pizza place is central to events that unfold in the series.  The protogonists of Evil Genius are downwardly mobile losers, alcoholics, crack addicts and crack whores.  Everyone lives in houses so spectacularly filthy that it's impossible to imagine any fate for the buildings, laden with rotting food, animal feces, chest-high piles of moldering clothing, and heaps of disassembled computer equipment, except to bulldoze them into the ground once the miscreants living there have been sent back to prison.  There is a palpable stench about everything shown in Evil Genius -- emaciated animals have to be put-down, deputies hold their noses because of the body odor of the criminal suspects that they arrest, and a corpse frozen like a turkey takes four days to unthaw on a puddled table in the morgue.  When a man is blown-up by a bomb wrapped around his neck by a metal locking collar, the authorities have to cut off the corpse's head to study the detonating device.  Wild Wild Country plays out like some deranged version of the Acts of the Apostles; Evil Genius is morbid, prurient, and cruel -- something like the darkest pages in Dostoevsky.

Evil Genius begins with footage showing a bank robbery under way.  A simple-minded 60-year old pizza delivery man struts into a bank with bomb latched around his neck and a cane that is also a loaded shotgun.  He presents convoluted and loquacious written demands for payment of $250,000 and a map with instructions for a sort of maniacal scavenger hunt to locate the key necessary to unlatch the ticking bomb over his heart.  Of course, the robbery goes awry -- the bank tellers have only $11,000 and the police immediately surround the robber.   While they are negotiating with him, the bomb's timer begins beeping and, shortly thereafter, there's an explosion that kills the erstwhile robber who has claimed that he is an unwitting victim of others.  The crime is bizarre and baffles local authorities.  Then, a month or so later, a man named Bill Rothstein calls police and says he has a corpse in the freezer in his garage.  For more than 35 years, Rothstein has aspired to be the boyfriend of a woman named Marjorie Diehl, once the prettiest girl in town and, possibly, the smartest person in Erie as well.  But Marjorie Diehl is crazy, has killed one boyfriend outright (she plead battered woman syndrome and was not convicted) and is now a widow -- her husband having died in suspicious circumstances.  Diehl is at the center of a web of small-time criminals and addicts -- some of them also drop dead immediately after the bombing -- and pretty soon it becomes apparent that the case involving the frozen corpse (Marjorie's boyfriend) is entwined with the bank heist. 

It takes Evil Genius, four episodes, each about an hour, to unravel the network of criminality surrounding the psychopathic Marjorie Diehl.  Even, then, much of bizarre behavior that the film documents seems inadequately motivated or simply arbitrary.  The protagonist is Marjorie Diehl and she is certainly spectacularly evil-looking, a heavy set women with a grimace contorting her lips, a wild mop of black hair, and dark eyes that are the stuff of nightmares.  (People who saw her for only a short glimpse were morally convinced that she was monstrously depraved and evil -- one man says that he expects he will remember her glance on the only occasion that he saw her for the rest of his life.)  The documentary is relentlessly lurid and exploitative -- everyone seems to be either an idiot or zombie-like drug addict or an evil master manipulator, oozing malice.  (The cops and FBI agents are stooges -- they refuse to cooperate with one another, engage in a vicious and counter-productive turf war, and couldn't find their own asses if you drew a map for them.)  The movie is a horror show showing every kind of awful thing:  there is the horror of filth and squalor depicted in the rotting mounds of detritus in people's houses, the horror of addiction, the horror of illness (people die of cancer and other diseases as the film progresses), the horror of the indignities of old age (Marjorie's youthful smiling face is contrasted with her present-day swollen, flabby mask-like features as she harangues the camera -- evil seems to be inscribed in her visage); there are horrors of imprisonment and obsession and, ultimately, the supreme horror of madness -- Marjorie is completely crazy and the people around her aren't conspicuously more sane.  The film ends with an interview with a crack whore at a bus stop outside of Biker Bar -- the crack whore has weird tics around her eyes and half her face seems to be traveling in a different direction from the rest of her countenance.  An elderly cocaine peddler is sent to prison.  He rejoices in finally having a home:  it's not so bad, he says, I got off the dope and, you know, I would have been dead if I had kept using like that -- and there's nothing outside for me anyway:  just bars and booze and drugs and crack whores.  Here, at least, you get your meds and have people to talk to.  The series is emetic but fascinating.  It's like a horrific accident -- you want to look away, but can't.  Stay for the whole show -- there are some oddly redemptive moments at the very end, tiny rays of light in the film's impenetrable darkness.