Bazaar Bizarre

James Ellroy is one of our greatest living crime novelists. (Ok, I can’t say that from personal experience unfortunately. I haven’t finished one of his books yet. The only one I’ve started is The Blue Dahlia…and I really want to finish it. But LA Confidential is an awesome movie and I’ve always heard that his books are just as good if not better. I’ll shut up now. But at least I’m honest!) He has a handle on criminals that most “innocent” people could never dream of having.

That’s why seeing his name attached to a documentary about a serial killer is a great selling point. Unfortunately this probably isn’t the movie that we all came to see.

Bob Berdella was a monster. No doubt about that. He entrapped young gay kids, knocked them out or drugged them, tied them to a bed naked and experimented/sodomized them with different objects. Then he killed them. Sometimes he kept them alive for quite a while (the longest was figured to have been about 73 days) so that he could keep coming back to them over and over again. He is thought to have occasionally cooked the bodies and possibly even served them at his store in chili. He only confessed to killing six kids, but there were at least 47 who went missing in the area he liked to take them from between 1984 and 1988.

He was caught because one of them (Chris Bryson, I believe) escaped from the room that he was being held in. He ran into the street wearing only a dog collar and yelled for help.

What we were all expecting was an investigation into a sick mind. To an extent we got that, but we also got some really weird-ass musical interludes, some pretty graphic reenactments and one very weird, exploitive movie. I expected some exploitation since it is a documentary about a fucking sicko, but I didn’t expect a movie that seemed to take glee in showing a man shove a carrot up another man’s ass. There was even a big “WARNING” sign just before they started to show that particular scene. And then it ended up looking something like a fetishist’s porn. It was really only disturbing because I’m not into that sort of thing. If someone who had been into it had walked in at that particular moment, they probably would have been pretty happy with it.

Add to that the fact that the musical interludes (performed by a band called The Demon Dogs) were cheesy as hell and the whole thing just kind of undermines the fact that Ellroy himself says that the man is a monster and should have been tortured the way that he tortured his victims. It’s like tickling someone and telling them not to laugh.

The most disturbing thing (besides all of the graphic torture scenes) was the interview with the real Berdella. It was conducted not too long after he was caught in 1988. They had to find someone from outside of Missouri (he was doing his dirty deeds in Kansas City) to interview him because he felt that the local press was demonizing him. I seriously think that he felt that was he did was justified because he was a “victim of society.” (Not his words, but they may as well have been.) If they cops had been more on their toes they would have caught him earlier.

The guy should have been a politician. He can shift blame with the best of them.

This was a deeply disturbing movie (and had me looking over my shoulder on the way to my car), but it wasn’t particularly good. It just kind of exploited its subject matter a bit too much for a serious expose of the serial killer’s mind.

(Ellroy and the director, Benjamin Meade, were both at the screening and talked before hand. Ol’ James is a weird guy. He came up to the front singing “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” with some pretty creepy lyrics. Ben said that at the premiere of another movie they made together James went on stage and said, “Reagan was right. Communism was shit.” Then he walked off stage again. The man is full of energy even when he’s dog-tired. And he’s a bit of a freak. But that’s all the more reason to love the guy.)