Berdella: The Movie is torture to sit through
Title: Berdella: The Movie
Date: 2009
Directed by: Paul South and
Bill Taft
Discovered at: My mailbox at
The Pitch
The poster promises: Either David Cross playing George Costanza or Jason Alexander playing Tobias Fünke
Representative quotes:
Bob: “I marinate all my meat and beans in a … nice … special … homemade sauce. One bite, and you never ever go back.”
Larry (later in the movie): “I’ve known you for 10 years, and I’ve never seen you with a woman. People are going to start getting ideas. You don’t have the AIDS, do you?”
Once you get past its halfwit script, wretched acting, glib amorality, and inability to establish a clear relationship between the action that takes place in any one scene to whatever happens in the next, you might be cheered by all the hometown pride coursing through Paul South and Bill Taft’s bloody go at canonizing murderer Bob Berdella as a screen monster.
In the opening scenes, the directors indulge in moody shots of the KC skyline, a discussion of Gates’ versus Arthur Bryant’s, and a visit from the Hyde Park Homes Tour committee. Over the opening credits, the filmmakers tool down Troost at night, tilting the camera up and around to make it seem scary. At the end, they cut from a cemetery to another shot of downtown, suggesting that Kansas City will forever be haunted by this story. That’s true, as long as some exploitative jackass (or two) wants to revel in it.
So few movies bother to explore Kansas City’s terrain that I’m almost willing to forgive South and Taft’s habit of fading to black often and for no clear reason, in a way that suggests Berdella going to commercial.
Or the way they set scenes inside moving cars despite having no idea how to film that way. With static black outside the windows, Berdella and company bob along like the cast of Lifeboat.
Or the way the camera is always in the wrong place, especially during the violence, which is never actually shown. Instead, it’s bobbled and botched, communicated in panicky spasms of editing, usually just out of the frame even when the violent act is lingered upon. In the opening sequence, for example, Berdella seems to claw-hammer barbecue sauce onto a victim. Because the filmmakers’ Twitter icon is a snapshot of a young man bloody and bound, and because they’ve posted fake snuff Polaroids on their Web site, I assume this omission has less to do with tastefulness than with money.
Early on, Berdella sells drugs to a guy named Larry. Then Larry hauls off and slaps his wife. But South and Taft don’t even show this. Instead of an actress or the impact, we see a wall and a stop sign. This, too, would be touching — a Bob Berdella movie taking a stand against domestic violence — if it were indicative of a moral outlook rather than a missing budget line.
Perhaps due to the failure even to suggest physical action, South and Taft resort to onscreen titles to indicate the worst of the torture. As Berdella handles a drill, blood flecking his face, lettering pops up to announce: “9:45 p.m. Drill Hole in Skull.” One fade to black later, we get “9:47 p.m. Inject Draino [sic] Into Skull.” What minor power the sequence had gathered is lost. Imagine Raiders of the Lost Ark telling us: “Face Melts Via Power of God” or No Country for Old Men explaining “Wipes Wife’s Blood Off Shoe.”
Shocking Detail
In July, a Pitch reporter spotted Rocky Vaerla wearing a Bob Berdella T-shirt, which is the second quickest way (behind owing a Hummer) to let the world know you’re probably an asshole. Vaerla, the designer of the shirt and a friend of South and Taft, conceded, “We’ve had some feedback from people who have acquaintances who are related to the victims, and it hasn’t been pretty.” Then, as if to make those acquaintances’ case for them, he added, “We wanted to make a straight-up, B-rated, underground movie that really puts Bob out there as an icon, and branding him, just like Ted Bundy or Richard Ramirez.”
Highlight
Seth Correa’s sketch-comedy-ready portrayal of Berdella is hardly iconic. The killer here is a lisping, singsongy fuckup who toodle-oos, “I made chili for everyone!” Later, he masturbates himself through layers of robe, and the squishing sound effects suggest someone plunging a toilet.
Eighty minutes in, with little drama, his final victim escapes, and the movie ends — without depicting Berdella’s arrest and without showing him having to account for his crimes. We’ve apparently already seen his big comeuppance: a scene in which he finds out he’s probably going to lose his booth at the Westport Flea Market.
That’s more than I can forgive, but Berdella isn’t worth getting upset over. I appreciate that some object to this movie on moral grounds, but I hope that the offended keep their peace. All that Berdella has going for it is the audacity of its very existence, and your silence can rob it of even that.
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