Witch Hunt (2008)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Sean Penn is an accomplished actor, but this documentary in which he is not seen, is unquestionably the most important film of his distinguished career. In the 1980s, a Satanic abuse panic spread throughout the United States, the most notable examples of which were McMartin and Bakersfield. The latter started as allegations of regular child sexual abuse, but grew into lurid tales of Satanism. One man was accused of murdering his son; the fact that the boy was very much alive did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of the witchfinders.Any claim of sexual abuse that includes women should automatically be suspect; one woman is passable, but a group of them? They just don't do that sort of thing, yet the fantasies persist to this day. These poor people were sentenced to dozens and in some cases hundreds of years in prison after being convicted on hundreds of charges on no evidence worthy of the name.Jeff Modahl spent 15 years behind bars; he was freed only after a tape came to light of a therapist, (so-called) and law enforcement coaching one of the young non-victims. John Stoll served 20 years, being freed on his 61st birthday. Even more sadly, two of those accused died in prison without clearing their names."Witch Hunt" includes much archive footage, interviews with parents, children (some now with children of their own), and some comments from the unrepetent persecutors who claim there was no actual witch hunt. This documentary is more relevant than ever at the time of review in light of the ongoing persecution and wilful miscarriages of justice being enacted here in the UK.

America can only remain a free nation if the judicial process is fair, untainted, and subject to review. During the early 1980's, it seems that the residents of Bakersfield, CA sacrificed their judicial rights for the illusion of Law And Order. WITCH HUNT is a riveting documentary about a group of citizens who became the target of a joint task force of Law Enforcement and Social Services that illegally and immorally usurped their power. The State's position was that this police and social service unit provided an opportunity for sexually abused children to be heard, and allow the law to apprehend and punish their abusers. However, as the the film clearly demonstrates, Child And Family Services, with the aid of an overzealous police force, were able to orchestrate children's testimony, and allowed the local government to create a non-existing threat to the community. Bakersfield became a city under siege by pedophiles-perverted by "Sexual Weapons Of Mass Destruction". WITCH HUNT shows that these 'dedicated and thoughtful public servants' invented a phony threat to the community, and then rode it for all it was worth. This 'Response To Evil' allowed them to parade before the media and appear to be 'Tough On Crime', when really they did nothing but railroad innocent citizens by using Child And Family Services to badger and bully innocent children until they gave them the 'sexual horror' that they craved. In no way should this film be viewed as a fair and balanced treatment of child molesters, but what this documentary shows us is that Law Enforcement and Social Service Agencies are able to foster a climate of hysteria which might allow citizens to give up an unbiased legal system for the illusion of Safety. In the commentary to the film, we find that when Child and Family Service personnel were told by the children that 'nothing happened', the impressionable children were badgered and bullied and told that they were 'in denial'. What is truly alarming is that, given these conditions, this gross travesty of justice could happen to any of us.

This film chronicles the events which transpired in Kern County (Bakersfield) California, and the dozens of people who were falsely charged with child sexual abuse as part of massive "sex rings". Specifically, the film tells the story of John Stoll, Scott and Brenda Kniffen, Alvin and Debbie McCuan, Jeff Modahl, Jack and Jackie Cummings, Rick and Marcella Pitts.This film is filled with heroes.The film makers themselves: for tackling such a difficult, and generally unpopular subject matter, and for their fortitude to stick with the project over more than four years determined to see these stories of injustice told.Those who were falsely imprisoned, bared down, stood strong, and fought the good fight, no matter how long it took, to see the truth about their innocence told.Those who were involved as with the police, social services, and the District Attorney's office as children, who now as young adults have been brave enough to come forward with the truth about how those in authority were acting in true "criminal" behavior, and not those accused of sexual abuse.However, hearing these particular young adults speak of their pain, guilt, trauma, confusion, and remorse over allowing social service workers to convince them to lie when they were children was the most powerful aspect of this film for me.I have heard many, many stories of false arrest. There is no doubt that the stories of struggle and survival from those falsely accused are moving beyond words. However, hearing the pain and perspective from the different side of those wronged by the justice system; hearing how much these false arrests harmed the children involved, is the most powerful aspect of this new film.A must see!

If I were judging this as a public service message, I'd give it a higher grade. As a documentary film, it spends all but the last fifteen minutes of its time on case studies of four or five families convicted of child molestation in Bakersfield, California. There were several dozen convictions, some 35 of which were reversed years later -- and I mean years. One innocent man and wife were excoriated by the judge and received cumulative sentences of more than 500 years. Before finding an organization willing to look closely into their cases, four of the cases we follow served ten or twenty years. (What do you do when you've spent 20 years in jail and are released on your 60th birthday, as one victim was?) And it was hard time, too -- San Quentin, where child molesters must claim they were convicted of owning automatic weapons and possession of marijuana if they want to live.It's interesting to see the development of the cases, the means by which convictions were brought, and the experiences of the victims, their children, their families and friends.One weakness -- aside from the unnecessarily lugubrious score -- is that there is really no attempt at an explanation, no attempt that involves any sophistication anyway. One or another of the talking heads attributes the wave of mass hysteria to "political ambition," "zealotry," and what we would call "command pressure." But those explanations don't tell us much. Let me put it this way. Why -- out of all the avenues of advancement -- did the politically ambitious District Attorney (who has been reelected seven times) happen to choose child molestation as his conduit to power? "Zealotry" is a personality trait that explains nothing. It's like saying "greed causes robbery." And "command pressure" -- the sense that those above you must be given the performance that they want from you -- is omnipresent, and constants can't explain variations.I'd love to have seen the case studies squeezed into one hour and the rest of the time given over to an examination of the causes of this craze at the time it happened in Bakersfield -- or rather the causes of these kinds of crazes as they happen again and again, over generations, over centuries. Because, when you get right down to it, collectively and historically, we've seen all this before in one form or another. Witchcraft, Freemasons, hidden Communists, pre-school porno rings, and Satanism. For the past few years we've been working on "internet predators" that do not exist to any measurable extent, according to the only scientifically respectable study that I'm aware of. (I taught sociology, including classes on social problems that used to be called "mass hysteria.") What started this particular craze in this particular place? And, equally important, what stopped it when it was finally ended? The explanation must lie in the system itself, the entire social system, of which the legal system is only an instrument. You can't really blame it on an ambitious DA.Is there some reason society NEEDS an internal enemy to hate? Anyway, that's a lot of criticism of a film that desperately needed making and would have been far more useful if it had been made twenty or twenty-five years ago. God, how many lives have been ruined by our righteous wrath?