Sandra Harris Writes

THE CONFESSION KILLER. (2019) DIRECTED BY ROBERT KEENER AND TAKI OLDHAM. ‘STARRING’ HENRY LEE LUCAS. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © This is another terrific true crime Netflix documentary, but your mind will probably boggle, like mine did, at some of the events contained therein. Henry Lee Lucas (1936-2001) was a convicted American murderer, born in Virginia to a prostitute mother and an alcoholic father. Not exactly a promising beginning. His mother, in particular, seems to have abused him physically, forced him to watch her having sex with clients and made him dress as a girl during his childhood. When he was ten, he lost an eye after a fight with his brother. His childhood seems to have been a really bad one. In 1960, Lucas went to jail for killing his mother. Shades of Norman Bates and Ed Gein, methinks. Lucas was released after only ten years due to prison overcrowding. In 1983, he confessed to the murders of an elderly woman for whom he’d been doing some work, and a teenage g...

THE LAST CZARS. (2019) A NETFLIX DOCU-DRAMA. DIRECTED BY ADRIAN MCDOWALL AND GARETH TUNLEY. STARRING ROBERT JACK, SUSANNA HERBERT AND BEN CARTWRIGHT. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © I absolutely loved this Netflix based-on-real-events docu-drama, although I’ve just read some reviews which delve painstakingly into all the historical inaccuracies supposedly contained within. Well, I don’t know anything about that. I’m not Russian and I didn’t really study much Russian history at school. I’d heard about Lenin and Trotsky, though for the life of me I couldn’t have previously told you what they were meant to be famous for, and, of course, I knew about dear cuddly old Uncle Joe, otherwise known as Stalin. Therefore, I was watching the show as a viewer looking to be entertained, rather than as an amateur historian looking to pick holes, and, in this sense, I bloody enjoyed every second of it. I was highly entertained, plus I even learned a few things about a really fascinating part of ...

  COFFEE-SHOP CONVERSATIONS. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © I met a total stranger in a coffee-shop yesterday, as you do, and, as we were the only two people in the place besides the staff, we chatted for well over an hour about… guess what? That’s right, the pandemic, lol. Shure, what else do Irish people have to talk about these days besides the blessed pandemic, unless it’s climate change, which is making our Irish weather even more unpredictable lately, or giving out about England for causing Brexit, which is causing our package deliveries from the UK to be delayed because the stuff we’ve ordered is all sitting in containers at Customs or on lorries somewhere in Eng-er-land? Ahem. No offence, Britain…! The pandemic, Brexit and climate change-slash-the weather, that’s all we Irish have to talk about nowadays. Isn’t it shocking? Still, at least we haven’t yet lost the art of conversation, as evidenced by my lovely chat with Maura yesterday. She told me how she’d come into the area...

NIGHT STALKER: THE HUNT FOR A SERIAL KILLER. (2021) DIRECTED BY TILLER RUSSELL. STARRING GIL CARRILLO AND FRANK SALERNO AS THEMSELVES. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © This Netflix true crime documentary is a really sinister and disturbing watch. In the 1980s, a series of horrific crimes- aggravated burglary, child molestation, child abduction and murders- in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas of the United States had the residents of those two cities on high alert. The thing is, though, that almost all of the crimes were different to the ones that preceded them, and it took a while for detectives on the case to link them together. Normally, a criminal keeps to the same MO or modus operandi and doesn’t deviate from it too much. For example, a man who shoots people from a safe distance, e.g., David Berkowitz in the ‘Son of Sam’ murders, doesn’t normally decide to suddenly stop doing this and start strangling his victims instead, which would entail up-close and personal contac...

SQUID GAME. (2021) A NETFLIX DRAMA CREATED, WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY HWANG DONG-HYUK. STARRING LEE JUNG-JAE, WI HA-JOON, JUNG HO-YEON AND PARK HAE-SOO. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © This Korean survival drama-slash-horror/thriller is Netflix’s most watched show ever, and that’s saying something. I gave in to pressure to watch it over Halloween 2021 after family members claimed it to be the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread. And whaddya know, they were nearly right too, lol. I loved it, and was barely breathing for some of the tenser moments, and it was chock-a-block with tense moments. I was sad when I was finished watching it, and I would definitely watch any sequel the powers-that-be had in mind, though I truly don’t know how any sequel could better the original series. I just want to note also that Hwang-Dong-Hyuk, the creator, writer and director of the series, should be the richest and the happiest guy in the world right now. Should be , I said, because things don’t often turn out...

  THE SONS OF SAM: A DESCENT INTO DARKNESS. (2021) A NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY DIRECTED BY JOSHUA ZEMAN. STARRING PAUL GIAMATTI AS THE VOICE OF MAURY TERRY. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © I’m trying not to get too excited about this four-episode Netflix crime doc, as, after all, real people were brutally murdered by the man who is its subject, but it certainly makes for gripping bloody television. So much so that I forgot, while I was watching it, to put the dinner on, and, worse, nearly forgot about the STRICTLY COME DANCING results show, lol, and that never happens.  Whatever about dinner, you do not forget about STRICTLY in this house! The documentary concerns the so-called ‘Son of Sam’ murders, which took place in New York City from July 1976 to July 1977. They held the city to ransom for that whole long horrible year, during which NYC felt to some people like a powder keg waiting to blow. The murders were committed by a gunman, dubbed the ‘Son of Sam’ because of tauntin...