Berdella (2009) Starring Seth Correa, Steve Williams, Denise Carroll, Stephen Bellinger & Elmer Parker Written by William Taft Directed by Paul South & William Taft

A bit of research shows that I was dead wrong. Bob Berdella was completely real, completely sick... and what's more my home turf seems to be a hotbed of serial killers. I guess Kansas is just boring enough to inspire a slew of maniacs. We've had Dahmer and BTK the two most famous, the Bender Family killed eleven travelers at their boarding house for their money, Don Nemechek killed five passengers in his car, Richard Grissom killed three roommates, John E. Robinson plead guilty to three murders to avoid being convicted of five. And then we have the man of the hour, Bob Berdella, the Kansas City Butcher.

The story of the film follows, pretty closely from the accounts I can find, the life and times of Berdella. In the 60's he moved to KC to go to Art school, but got mixed up in drug charges and it derailed his life. He went on to open Bob's Bizarre Bazaar (where my Great Aunt had shopped!), a section of a flea market that became fairly popular. He exhibited an affluence for cooking. Amidst this, he started picking up men in gay bars, drifters gliding through the area, and sometimes using his supply of drugs to lure men into his clutches where he would rape and eventually murder them, keeping detailed entries in his journal. The film chronicles the exploits of his murders from the demise of his first victim until his eventual arrest.

The story of Berdella works. Of course, its based on true events, all of them too weird to not be interesting. The true test of the film comes from its craftsmanship, and how well the movie works given its budget constraints. This movie is as Indy as it gets, a group of local filmmakers cobbling together the dark history of their hometown.

The film opens strongly, wisely using a famous anecdote from Berdella's past, crafting a scene where co-workers drive a drunken Bob home, as he brags about the boy he's been torturing. His friends laugh it off as weird Bob telling some sort of drunken story, his macabre sense of humor well known to them, a scene which sets up what Bob's been up to, as well as explaining why none of his friends suspect anything. They think he's drunk and joking around all the time. An eerie scene awaits him at home, his first victim, nude and strung up by his ankles, a grisly death awaiting him. It's all true to the tales that float around KC, and looks nicely creepy, the 1984 atmosphere more strongly created by the grainy film-stock.

The quality of the torture scenes continues throughout the film. Rather than using the standard style of torture-porn films, like Hostel, Berdella leans towards a more art-house approach, layering gruesome images of tortured victims over drug-induced rants from Bob, and Catholic imagery and art gathered from the Bazaar. You can tell right away from the planning involved that when the crew put this film together, they were imminently inspired by the carnage Bob created.

Beyond that, though, the film has a lot of flat aspects. The most distracting element of the film is the sound, particularly the canned foley. The sound effects pull you out of the film at every opportunity, from simple door chimes to stab wounds, nothing sounds natural. The worst is probably Berdella's masturbation sounds, which are something like jamming meat into a canister of Nickelodeon Gack.

Mentions of KC Landmarks are nice, though often shoe-horned into the dialog. It would have been nice to see a few more of them, rather than the generic housing districts, something to give the movie a real KC feel. Permits take some time to acquire, and you can tell these fellas didn't take that time to hunt them down. Speaking of taking a little time, how about proofreading the Berdella time-line in the special features? Typos abound.

Overall, there are a lot of bad elements in the movie, chiefly the acting and dialog. All the lines feel forced, and are typically really cheesy, often expository. The sets are pretty bland, excusable in the homes, but the Bazaar looks nothing like a flea market shop so much as it looks like a corner in someone's garage with a table that has maybe five items on it for sale. The limitations of the crew's budget, and possibly their imagination, are constantly on display.

That aside, this does provide an accurate, and probably unique, look at the Kansas City Butcher. While I can't recommend the film to movie-goers and arm-chair critics out there, I think it might be one to pick-up for serial-killer enthusiasts, one to shelve next to films like Helter Skelter and Gacy. In lieu of a full-scale documentary, this is a good substitute. Berdella has just hit DVD and is available for order via Amazon.