Sideworld: Terrors of the Sea

 Calling it a documentary might be stretching the definition a little; The Sideworld movies collect spooky bits of folklore and historical miscellany (mostly from England) and bundle them into themed packages. In this case, the sea. Director Alexander Popov narrates from Jonathan Russell's script, along with good music (by Matthew Laming) and some beautiful nature footage and images from historical documents (DP: Richard Suckling); No re-enactments. The presentation is slick and unobtrusive.

 The stories are mostly regional tales from the British coasts and cover a nice range of nautical subjects, each one given a whole chapter: ghost ships, sea monsters, sailor ghost stories and underwater people. The incidents discussed are pretty interesting, and provide some sources were possible, but the focus is in keeping them fleet of foot and entertaining.

 They also get fairly obscure; the Ghost Ships segment, for example, touches briefly upon the Flying Dutchman and Mary Celeste by way of introduction, but spends most of its time on a particularly haunted sandbar just off England's southeastern coast.

 Popov makes for an great host, and while the script sometimes gets a mite too purple for my taste (the rhetorical questions at the end of each chapter made me chuckle) its contents don't push for supernatural explanations or call for credulity- not too hard, at least. Sometimes it sounds like Popov is workshopping horror story ideas based on whatever he's expounding on, and there's plenty sops to scepticism.

 It's an unpretentious and nerdy exercise which just happens to be a excellent way to spend seventy minutes.