Holy Hell (Netflix)

At first glance, Buddhafield, the cult at the center of the new documentary Holy Hell, can seem a tad more innocuous than the cults we normally see in documentary films. There are no drugs, no compounds, no stockpiles of ammunition, no uniforms, no talk of Armageddon, and no one seems forcibly trapped anywhere. It is a society based on love, ballet, and a willingness to follow “The Teacher,” a Speedo-clad guru who believes that “the orgasm of meditation is stronger than the orgasm of sex.” Will Allen, the film’s director and twenty-year member of Buddhafield, paints an idyllic picture of what this must have been like. He has gathered other former members and they give us a side of the story that we normally don’t get. Holy Hell is concerned, first and foremost, with figuring out what drew these people to “The Teacher” and what kept them there. No one is a zealot or an outcast; these are normal people looking for a place in life and finding it here.

The film isn’t concerned with “The Teacher” as much as it is with the people who followed him, which is a welcome change of pace from the normal film of this genre. Allen worked for years as the unofficial videographer of Buddhafield, so his footage is phenomenal. He is able to put us right in the center of the action, and combined with the frankness of his friends who testify about their time, we are able to understand exactly what being in this cult was like. By the time we get to the end, we have been sucked into the cult also. Allen smartly saves the biggest revelations about “The Teacher” until the end. Just as many members who we come to know were taken by surprise of what was happening behind the scenes at Buddhafield, we too have the carpet pulled out from under us (although it isn’t as shocking a reveal to us as it was to them, mostly because we’ve come to expect these kind of revelations about cults). Holy Hell wants to put us in the middle of a cult, to experience what it is like to believe in something and find salvation in it, and then to have it all stripped away suddenly. In that way, it is a chilling experience.

Raiders! The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made (Netflix)

It can be telling when a title contains a superlative like “Greatest” in it because you feel like already the filmmakers have put themselves at a disadvantage. In the case of Raiders! The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made, it is proof that filmmakers Jeremy Coon and Tim Skousen are so in love with the subject matter that the documentary ends up being more of an unabashed fan film than the film it is documenting. That film is Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, a shot-by-shot recreation of the classic Steven Spielberg adventure film done by a group of teenage boys in 1980s Mississippi. Over the course of seven years they managed to recreate every moment of the film minus one – the sprawling airport fight in front of a moving airplane – and decades later their piece of fan art became a midnight movie craze. Coon and Skousen set out to tell three stories: the remarkable tale of the teenage boys recreating their favorite film, the legend of how the film became a cult favorite, and the present-day tale of the boys coming back together midlife to finish their film.

There is a lot of interesting stuff in Raiders!, mostly the ridiculous exploits the boys went through as teenagers to capture their art, nearly burning down houses and coming close to death a couple of times. The film lacks any sort of thesis, though, besides “this fan film is awesome,” and the film lacks because of that. We watch the boys risk a lot, and in many ways risk even more when they return to their film 25 years later, but never are we really convinced as to why this is worth it. The glimpses we see of their fan film are impeccably made, but they are surface recreations of a layered work of art; the same can be said for the documentary about it.