Talhotblond

This will make you think twice about who you talk to online, maybe even make you think three or four times about it. We've all seen "To Catch a Predator" this is.... not that, the damage done here goes so much deeper.

I don't want to give away to much about this documentary, but I'll do my best to explain what it is. A man named Thomas Montgomery is bored with his life, his middle aged wife and two daughters, he works at a factory making guns. There is not much exciting about his life, that is until he meets a girl in a chat room, shes 18 and looking for an escape from the little town she lives in, in West Virginia, her screen name, Talhotblond, who says her name is Jessi. Thomas becomes Tommy, a fellow 18 year old, who's a sniper in the Marines, and they fall in love. When Montogomery's wife finds out she sends a letter to Jessi telling her the truth.

An online fight ensues, but they end up talking again. Jessi now is talking to a coworkers of Thomas' a younger man in his early twenties. She is stirring up a jealousy and hatred in Thomas. He ends up killing this younger man, like a sniper would, and a man hunt begins as more secrets are revealed and the stakes become clear.

This is the real story of three people who had a love triangle with the two men never actually meeting the girl. They became so enthralled with their own online story they killed for it. It is a very well made documentary, it looks good, and keeps up a nice pace. They got access to people involved with this story that I wouldn't have thought they would have been able to pull off.

Its a scary thought that there are so many people out there who do this sort of thing, they build up these fantasies in their minds that they think it's real. Thomas actually thought that if he wished hard enough he could reenter youth, become 19 again, even have a bigger penis. Disturbing in so many ways, and so sad. What makes a person so delusional that they start to believe that sort of thing? Because of two peoples actions, someone ended up dead, lives in two different families were ruined, and for nothing, for absolutely nothing. They never met each other, how could they become this enraged, this homicidal from a chat room, from reading some misspelled writing scrawled in an IM window. Even taking into account this went on for months it still doesn't explain it all.

They do run into a few problems in how they have to tell the story, they need to have the conversations from online for us to see, there's no audio, just at times words coming up on the screen telling us what they were saying to one another. It was what they had to do, and they couldn't help it, but it still bothered me after a little while.

An interesting and sad watch. I wish that there weren't people out there like this, to many people that seem normal have this deep rooted psychosis, and its scary to me. 8/10 stars.

Director: Barbara Schroeder