Change Your Image
mcdonaldent
Reviews
Bazaar Bizarre (2004)
Dark, haunting
Bob Berdella was a fat whack-job with a handlebar mustache.
He had presumptions of decadent worldliness
a sort of self-styled, poor man's Baudelaire.
Berdella owned a Kansas City head shop and a now razed house.
In that house, and around it, he raped and tortured his victims.
A few he buried around that house.
Some victims were maybe set out with the weekly trash and now languish in some landfill.
A few others maybe ended up as entrees. Or so is theorized in Ben Meade's harrowing documentary, "Bazaar Bizarre."
Their killer died in prison of an apparent heart-attack. Berdella is credited with six kills.
Berdella's victims were all men. 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. Even a full-frontal reenactment of a bloody and nude run for his life by a victim. The man managed to escape Berdella, clad only in a dog-collar.
In the dark world of Ben Meade, the camera never shifts away.
The camera never blinks and 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. Ellroy counsels no compassion for the rotting killer.
Ellroy shares 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.
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 film-making.
Vakvagany (2002)
Dark and different
The dark heart of Benjamin Meade's "Vakvagany" consists of creepy home movies, filmed sometime between 1948 and 1964, purportedly stolen from a filthy house in Hungary that was said to be crawling with cats.
"Vakvagany" zig-zags through time, sampling the stolen family films, juxtaposing them with newly-filmed footage of the old movies' still-living participants, and interviews with three spirit guides who offer their take on lurid life with the family depicted in the old and new footage: crime novelist James Ellroy (of "L.A. Confidential" fame) , psychiatrist Dr. Roy Menninger and filmmaker Stan Brakhage.
The vintage films focus on life with the Locsei family, a Hungarian couple fond of filming one another and their eventual, ill-fated offspring.
The setting for the `found' film is demolished, post-World War II Europe (much of the footage depicts damage done to cities during the war).
The usual family moments are captured in the old family films, such as giving the new baby in the house a bath.
But the camera lingers lasciviously long on naked son Erno, a cause for concern for `expert witness,' Dr. Roy Menninger, who seems increasingly to be wincing as the film (and the old family footage) unfolds. There are moments in Vakvagany - old and new - that are apt to make virtually any viewer, even the most jaded, wince, as well.
Benjamin Meade's "Vakvagany" (or, variously, "Dead End") is eighty-plus minutes of very strange cinema. Love it or hate it, it is something new, and it feels dangerous and important.
Meade has said he became enthralled with the vintage home movies and their potentially sinister subject matter: in particular, father Locsei's never clearly defined role in allegedly `helping' the European Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. The form this `help' takes is sufficiently vague to leave room for some very dark deductions regarding what exactly Papa Locsei does for a living that could be construed as `help' for potential Nazi victims.
Director Benjamin Meade lets the viewer, and his three `experts,' attempt to decide (You know you're along for a strange, strange ride when noir novelist James Ellroy, notorious for his wild stage presence and book readings, tends toward the most mundane explanations for some very, very strange behavior.)
The Alloy Orchestra, famed for its wonderful scores for vintage silent films, provides a haunting, beautiful soundtrack for "Vakvagany."
While a sometimes disturbing view, Meade's film is a rewarding ride that can't be forgotten.
Stay Clean (2002)
Excellent James Ellroy-inspired short film
A righteous rendition of a pivotal chapter of a James Ellroy (of "L.A. Confidential" fame) novel narrated by a serial killer.
Filmed in moody black and white, a trio of cops confront an axe murderer about his gruesome slaying of a young couple.
Walter Coppage, riveting as the lead cop, deserves an A-list role.
Race Owen, as the dissembling dismemberer, is disarmingly sympathetic.
Director/writer Mitch Brian delivers a spot-on vision of author Ellroy's unique world and distinctive narrative voice. Brian's take on Ellroy's twisted, killer-narrated novel leaves one hoping that the producers of the just-announced, planned adaptation of "Killer on the Road" - the novel from which this gem was gleaned - turn to Brian for a full length treatment.
(P.S. Watch for a brief, powerful cameo by author Ellroy, portraying a cop who delivers the film's pay-off line.)