www.bazaarbizarre.com   Horror/Documentary 2005   93 min

Executive Producer: James Ellroy (LA Confidential, Black Dahlia)
Director: Benjamin Meade

Cast as themselves: James Ellroy, Robert Berdella, Chris Bryson

Profilic crime novelist James Ellroy (LA Confidential, Black Dahlia) presents this shocking true story of Robert A. “Bob” Berdella, who between 1985 and 1988, tortured, sodomized, photographed, and murdered six young men, dismembered them in the bathtub putting their bagged remains out on the curb for Monday morning trash pick-up. Berdella was the 39-year old owner of Bob's Bizarre Bazaar in Kansas City, a downtown novelty shop that specialized in lava lamps, replica skulls, incense, and other kinds of supplies that would appeal to potheads and weekend Satanists. His many secrets had begun to emerge on the Saturday the Final Four tourney got under way when Chris Bryson in 1988 was found running down a Kansas City street naked, beaten, and bloody wearing nothing but a dog collar and a leash.

Berdella later confessed to killing six men -- some by lethal injection, some by suffocation. All victims suffered tremendous horrors, as Berdella would torture them with electrical shocks, inject them with animal tranqualizers, sodomize them with vegetables, put bleach their eyes, and inject drain cleaner into their voicebox to keep them from screaming. What police called torture, Berdella called "my darkest fantasies becoming my reality."

 

Reviews-

Eric Campos- FilmThreat

"It's not every serial killer film that's presented by James Ellroy. That's why this one grabs your attention immediately. This is the most creative, and successful, re-telling of a true crime that I've ever seen. If you're sick of all the lame true crime serial killer flicks clogging the shelves of your local video store that are essentially dull TV movies with boobs, blood and bad words, then you're advised to check out "Bazaar Bizarre." It provides creativity in a genre of film that has long since run dry of imagination."
****1/2 out of five stars

Festivals-

The International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam (2004)
The Zagreb International Film Festival (Croatia 2004)
The Three Rivers International Film Festival (Pittsburg,PA)
The Kansas Interanational Film Festival (2004)
The International Festival of Horror (2004)
The Philadelphia Film Festsival (2005)
The Eerie International Horror Film Festival (2005)
Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (2005)
Frightfest UK (2005)
The Philadelphia Film festival (2005)
Flanders International Film Festival (Belgium, 2005)
Festivaletteratura Mantova, Italy (2005)

Addtional Screenings:

The Alamo Drafthouse-Austin Texas (2004)
The San Fransicso Museum of Modern Art (2004)

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