Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple

Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple
Photo: Jim Jones: California Historical Society

Reverend, seducer, icon of warped Elvis cool, Jim Jones led the creepiest bad trip of the ’70s — the mass suicide of 900 of his followers in Guyana. This slipshod doc offers fascinating footage of Jones’ silky malevolence (he has the eyes of a perverted hypnotist), and it captures one aspect of the story that has been crucially underplayed: The Peoples Temple congregation was sizably African-American. But when it comes to how those followers turned into a zombie Kool-Aid death cult, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple leaves you with more questions than you went in with.

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