James Ellroy Presents Bazaar Bizarre

In April 1988, 39-year-old Robert Berdella, owner of Bob’s Bazaar Bizarre in Kansas City, specialising in all kinds of curiosities, was arrested after a kidnapped and tortured man had escaped from his house. The man had good reason to escape: Berdella confessed to having killed six young men in the previous four years, whom he had picked up from the street and locked up in his house, which was equipped with a torture chamber. He performed experiments on them, injected them with drugs, electrocuted them and anally penetrated them with all sorts of vegetables and his own erect penis. He captured all of this on countless Polaroids and then remorselessly disposed of the corpses. Crime writer James Ellroy presents this hair-raising reconstruction, which is enlivened by musical intermezzos by a guitar band. The atrocities that Berdella committed on his victims are made explicit in misty re-enacted scenes. The disguised survivor and other people involved tell their stories. The brute himself also speaks briefly, in an interview a few months after his arrest. Berdella considered his victims soulless objects that he could practise his darkest fantasies on. Feeling wronged, he contends that the media are treating him in the same manner now. Four years after his conviction, Berdella died in prison.