The El Duce Tapes. Rodney Ascher & David Lawrence.

Compellingly edited from a multitude of VHS tapes, the unusually candid interviews with Mentors madman El Duce in various degrees of inebriation provides fascinating insight into his volatile, pointedly self-destructive life. The El Duce Tapes is an unfiltered, painfully frank, queasily visceral document, this deliciously Dementored dissection of a maniacal musical misfit probes balls deep into the sleazy underbelly of punk's most divisive bogeyman. When audibly cogent, El Duce comes across as an impish, melancholic, honest, vastly contradictory, strangely endearing poltroon, contrasting the altogether nihilistic interludes of depressive, boorishly incoherent drunkenness, culminating inevitably in alcoholic annihilation. As a fan of The Mentors, the archival material proved revelatory, featuring invaluable insight from band members, and their musical peers, especially edifying are the impactful contributions from his beloved sister. Pieced together from Standard VHS, The El Duce Tapes is not only a cohesive, and massively entertaining work, it is also a testament to the innate watchability of its subject, and a credit to all those talented individuals who made this exemplary Blu-ray possible. It isn't all that often that I'll know intuitively beforehand that I'll love a film, and in this even rarer instance, The El Duce Tapes proved far more righteous than I had imagined.