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Reviews
Personal Injury Court (2019)
Clearly fake but can be funny at times
I caught the show while channel surfing one morning and it was amusing. As a retired Trauma nurse it took all of ten seconds to tell the injuries were fake & the litigants paid actors. I about fell over laughing at the sight of a young woman (supposedly) carting around a massive Halo stabilization rig into court. Yeah, right. Of course her doctor's going to approve her bouncing about in a vehicle to go to court in that set-up & risk infection because the lawsuit couldn't wait six more weeks til she was out of it! OK, so I catch a few more & they're more or less the same. Sometimes the actors did a fairly credible job depicting the claimed injuries. Other times they were campy.
The so- called medical & other 'experts' were mostly laughable. Amazing a six-digit award for damages can be determined by 45 seconds of medical 'testimony'. Absent entirely is legal counsel for either side. Um, over the years we've sued people in small claims court & I've had to testify in others and not once did we step into court without our lawyers present!
Judge Gino Brogdon makes things even more wacko as he gets so wrapped up in the stories he's almost a caricature. At times he becomes totally emotionally involved in one side or the other, usually commiserating with the injured party. "Oh, my! That must've been awful!", or "As much as I sympathize with your terrible injuries unfortunately I find you 51% at fault and, as much as it pains me, the law does not allow me to award you anything." Having had to testify or attend some of these types of cases in real life I know no judge talks or acts like this. But Judge Gino Brogdon does make things entertaining. Hubby & I began betting on who would win & the size of the 'judgement'.
Once we'd seen most of the episodes, we didn't bother with reruns.
Experiment Alcatraz (1950)
Good to watch at least once. Had some editing oopsies
Flipped to TCM by accident & the opening intrigued me so I recorded it to watch later in evening. Starts w/idea in 50's nobody would believe i.e. that U.S. military would offer 6 extreme-risk felons full parole if they'd be part of an experiment that would most likely kill them. (Today of course, most would accept the idea of a US agency not only risking peoples' lives to achieve some goal & letting five extremely dangerous prisoners go free to cover up some terrible error in the program.
As an RN with 30+ yrs. experience I absolutely believed the Where the nurse had to take the fall for the experiment's deadly outcome. (That still happens all the time in even modern times.) I also chuckled when that poor little nurse & hero doctor go to beg the administrator & when they arrive the nurse cheerfully goes off to make coffee while the two doctors confer about how to gave the program.
There were some interesting editing oopsies i.e. fights & stunts were filmed from bad angles so one could see how obviously punches were pulled & actors sort of 'fell on command'. The end of the movie's a full page of a magazine or paper proclaiming the main character a hero. If you stop the movie on the frame showing this page you find the same paragraphs repeat throughout the article.
Whoever wrote that page didn't read the script, because the first paragraph reads "
following the dramatic turn of events culminating in the murder of a scientist and inventor of a sensational new therapy."
The next paragraph readers "Convicts of the state prison had volunteered to take the tests which might mean death to them." That portion of the article alternates repeatedly (starting on top of the next column) with "...was so intent on the success of his experiments that he volunteered to take the tests himself. Death will no doubt delay the progress of the experiments."
Of course, in 1950 other than the editors no one had the ability to stop & view a single Frame at a time nor watch a scene in slow- motion to critique it, but that doesn't let them off the hook for failure to catch errors.
Despite these minor glitches, this still remains a watchable movie Which starts with an implausible idea & manages to convert it into some rather good plot twists and (in 1950 at least), a surprising ending where the hero's killed (I found myself expecting the hero- doctor had expected to find the bad guy/convict there & prevented being killed) a (fairly) minor character comes to the (experiment's) rescue & risks his own life to save the day.