Bayview Entertainment has tabbed Dec. 8 as the DVD release date for documentary filmmakers Damon Cameron and Steve Lund’s Fatbelly: Chopper ... Unchopped.
Aussie Mark Brandon Read was a sweetheart, a published author (“From the Inside”), the subject of director Andrew Dominik’s 2000 biopic, Chopper, starring Eric Bana … and a homicidal maniac; a gang banger and a convict, who spent 24 of his 58 years in prison.
Cameron and Lund got access to Read and recorded his “story,” which is part horror story, part fable and without a doubt, intense. He would kidnap people, mainly drug dealers, as a young thug and torture them … chop, chop, chop off-went their toes, or perhaps a blowtorch to the flesh. Oh, they would pay to stop that. It was a nice little scam, except he wasn’t very good at staying out of prison.
In prison it was just as bad, even the members of his own “Overcoat Gang” tried to kill him. By his own reckoning, Read, had been stabbed multiple times, shot, hit in the head with all sorts of things (including a claw hammer) and undergone shock treatment for months. 13 murders were attributed to Read … convicted on several.
On the “plus” side, Read wrote a number of novels, selling nearly a half-million copies, and, as you watch him in Cameron and Lund’s documentary, you realize that he is quite the storyteller. He was even married twice and fathered two children … ironically, he did not die a violent death at the hands of either the state (execution) or his associates, but of liver cancer.
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