ELLROY TO SERVE AS EXECUTIVE PRODUCER OF NEW FILM (1/28/04): In August 2003, we were the first to announce that Benjamin Meade, who made the excellent film Vakvagany which featured James Ellroy, was planning a new project, Bazaar Bizarre about deceased, Kansas City-based serial killer Bob Berdella. Meade has some new news about the film: "I thought I would let you know that James has signed on as executive producer of the new film (besides being the voice of reason in the film). There is also a band we put together for part of the soundtrack called the Demon Dogs."

According to Meade, "Berdella lured young men into his home, drugged, tortured and killed them. He then cut up their bodies, put them in trash bags and set them out for the trashman each Monday. He died in prison about 6 years ago.”

Dream Nebula (1999) The Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee (1998), The KAN Film Festival (1998), The Boston Underground Film Festival (2000), The Midwest Harvest Arts Festival (1999)

Privilege (2000) The New York International Independent Film and Video Festival (2001), Deep Ellum Film Festival (2000), The Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee (2000), The KAN Film Festival (2000), The Denver Film Festival (2001), The Midwest Harvest Arts Festival (2001), The Southern Hungarian Film Festival (2001, 2002).

Bailar (To Dance) (2001) The Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee (2001), The Southern Hungarian Film Festival (2001)

Airplane Crazy (2002) The Wichita National Film Festival (2002), The Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee (2002), The KAN Film Festival (2002)

Bob Berdella was a fat, bespectacled whack-job with a handlebar moustache and presumptions of decadent worldliness … a sort of self-styled, poor man’s Baudelaire.

Bob B. owned a Kansas City head shop and a now razed house in K.C. In that house, and around it, he raped and tortured his victims and buried a few … others were maybe set out with the weekly trash and are now languishing in some landfill … a few maybe ended up as entrees.

Or so is theorized in Ben Meade’s harrowing documentary, Bazaar Bizarre.

The killer, who died in prison of an apparent heart-attack, is credited with six kills — his victims were all men — but Meade points out as many as 47 were reported missing in and around K.C. concurrent with Berdella’s period of activity.

Those familiar with Meade’s Vakvagany are probably best prepared for the flavor of film experience they’re in for: It’s take-no-prisoners territory again. Dark portentous music … sibilant whispers … full-frontal reenactments of a bloody and nude run for his life by a (lucky?) victim — one who managed to escape Berdella, clad only in a dog-collar.

In the dark land of Ben Meade, the camera never shifts away, never blinks … never judges.

Meade has tracked down journalists, still-living victims and makes powerful use of an old jailhouse interview with Berdella, himself. And there is James Ellroy.

The crime writer, clad in a yellow- and black-striped rugby shirt, looking for all the world like some avenging bee of logic and reason, chips in with his take on Berdella … counseling no compassion for the rotting killer … sharing his own rarified takes on the minds of sexual psychopaths:

"Homosexual men kill men. Heterosexual men kill women. It goes like that. That’s it: You kill within your racial profile. You kill within your sexual profile."

Ellroy’s most effective moments come when he is crosscut against Berdella’s own filmed statements.

Serial killers tend to be manipulative, self-justifying, self-rationalizing …they excel at drawing others into their sphere of self-delusion. But Ellroy doesn’t fall prey: "Serial killers are sacks of shit," Ellroy says. Bob Berdella "had a longstanding love affair with the male anatomy," Ellroy says. "If he wasn’t incarcerated or dead," Ellroy asserts, Berdella would "still be killing people."

The serial killer shopkeeper whose Kansas City store, "Bazaar Bizarre" supplies the title for Meade’s film, was equal parts John Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer.

Like Gacy, he used his own home as a charnel house and dumping ground.

Like Dahmer, Berdella experimented with his victims.

Dahmer, another jailhouse dead man, attempted do-it-yourself brain surgery on his victims, hoping to create compliant sex zombies. Berdella injected Drano into the throats of his victims.

Berdella also kept diaries, so we know the suffering of his victims sometimes extended across several nightmarish days.

Meade, using grainy film stock and a held-hand camera, stages unflinching reenactments of Berdella’s activities with his victims … rape, fisting … a disemboweling … disarticulation of bodies.

With such scenes, Meade has to walk a delicate line — skirting exploitation or possible glorification of Berdella … the opening of old wounds in Kansas City (although this is probably inevitable, under any circumstances).

The chorus of experts, and particularly James Ellroy, do much to contextualize Berdella. Several also decry the bewildering lack of local outrage regarding the killer’s crimes.

The "Demon Dogs" weigh-in with garage-band style tunes about Berdella — working well within the venerable and violent American tradition of vintage folk murder ballads.

Rough?

Dark?

Sure, the film is all of that.

Not for the squeamish?

Probably.

But if you’re signing on to watch a documentary about a serial killer, you know what you’re going to be confronted with.

And Meade’s graphic depictions of Berdella at work are well within the boundaries of films such as The Silence of the Lambs, or even the various CSI series, where beheadings, vivisections and post-mortem manipulations of bodies and body parts are served up as entertainment.

This is the real thing … riveting, revolting and, ultimately, illuminating … a bravura triumph of guerilla filmmaking.

— Sept. 12, 2004