Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with another batch of reviews from the Santa Barbara Film Festival. I have for your consideration a double header of Reichian proportions. And none of this involves Uwe Boll or his #7 Worst Film of All Time that recently suffered a resounding box office belly flop, strangely enough.

Topping the bill is the slightly more than an hour long documentary from Joe Berlinger, who co-directed my favorite documentary series of all time with his PARADISE LOST films, called GRAY MATTER, trying to track down a man with the totally appropriate title of Dr. Gross who was in charge of the murder of over 700 children in Vienna during the Nazi days in order to slice up their brains for his experiments.

Second up is a doc not nearly as good called NAZI GOLD IN ARGENTINA, which tries to trace a huge shipment of nazi gold (calm down, Uwe) to Argentina, but focuses mostly on the Argentinian government (including Evita and her ruling husband) and their efforts to help hide Nazi war criminals after WW2.

GRAY MATTER

Let's start with the one that doesn't suck. As I said before, I love Berlinger's work so far... and this is coming from someone who hasn't seen METALICA: SOME KIND OF MONSTER YET, which everyone says is brilliant. Berlinger has a way of putting you right in the moment with his works. GRAY MATTER is no different, even if the style, length and subject matter is much different from what he's done before.

One of the stylistic differences (at least from PARADISE LOST) is how much he includes himself in the doc. I'm not sure how much I like that as one can't help but think that some of shots of him really feeling the weight of the murder of these children are staged, even if he's completely genuine.

The doc follows Berlinger as he goes to Vienna for this kind of creepy PR stunt by a hospital called Speigelgrund. They've had hundreds and hundreds of brains in jars sitting in their basement since the hospital was used by the Nazis to experiment on handicapped children. Well, by handicapped that meant any child at an orphanage that ever acted out as well as the mentally retarded, deaf, blind and just overly hyper kids. The hospital is now burying the brains in a big PR stunt, flying press from around the world in to cover the event.

All this was in a push for that perfect race Hitler liked so much. They wanted to find out what in the brain made these kids different so they could start breeding them out of the Aryan race. This concept, of eliminating those different in society, acclimatized the Nazi loyalists to the mindset that dehumanized the Jews, which led to the concentration camps, according to Berlinger. It was what he believes opened the door for the genocide.

In particular there was one man who was in control of this "experiment" who never went into hiding, who continued to work for the hospital, doing research on the brains of the murdered children for another 50 years, up until the early 90s. He's now retired, living somewhere in Vienna an old, old man, pulling government pension. He was a favorite witness for the court, doing up to 12,000 appearances a year and used his connections with the judges and lawyers to keep out of jail when the pressure was turned up.

This happened, in particular, when the Berlin wall fell and the Russian classified documents were released. There's our good friend, Dr. Gross' signature approving the deaths of many of the children. Hard, factual evidence. Yet he was still let free and even awarded government medals for his work with the courts.

This doc is really effecting, as you'd come to expect from Berlinger. There was a shot of one of the jars in "the brain room" about 20 minutes in that set the whole theater gasping. Most of the jars just have very old, yellowed brains or partial brain segments in them, which isn't very shocking in this day and age... but one jar had the severed head of a 12 year old girl, kept preserved for more than half a century. She could have been asleep, she was that well preserved.

I believe this doc was made for Showtime or Cinemax or some cable channel, which is fine. The subject matter doesn't really take to being feature length, but is important to cover. There's also a fascinating debate on the ethics of continued experimentation on the brains. It's a shame that they killed all the children, but should they have died in vain? Or more over, is it the fact that the man who authorized the murder and participated in the torture of these children is the one still playing with their brains?

This is good stuff. If you see it on cable or on the video store shelf, pick it up and give it a watch.

NAZI GOLD IN ARGENTINA

But if you see this one on the video shelf or on the cable channel avoid it at all costs. They took an interesting premise, using government files to illustrate the corruption in the political structure that made Argentina a safe haven for Nazi war criminals and how the nazi gold, pilfered during their invasion of other countries, gave such a huge boost to the Argentinian economy that they all shared the most prosperous times in the history of the country.

Unfortunately, for some god awful reason the filmmakers decided to make this as boring as possible while integrating the worst dramatized scenarios as they could fit in... Really, really bad stuff of people pulling a heavy box (gold) up the beach where they snuck in... leaving a swastika impression in the sand that later gets washed away by the incoming waves...

The problem with that is they don't distinguish when they're showing real footage from that era and what's fake for the doc, so you never really buy anything they show. It's just an all around boring, tedious hour and a half. The only interesting thing in the doc was the theories about Evita using her celebrity to transport communications from Europe to the hiding Nazis in Argentina and helping secure their transport. But they don't ever back it up with anything substantial, just "Isn't it funny that she scheduled trips to Germany right when (Blank) turned up in Argentina."

That's it from me on this one. I have a few more Santa Barbara reviews and some other goodies to share in the near future. 'Til then, this is Quint bidding you all a fond farewell and adieu.

-Quint