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MURDER BALLAD
INTO THE ABYSS (PG-13) On Oct 24, 2001,
Michael James Perry and Jason Burkett both
19 years old, murdered Sandra Stotler, aged
50, in her Conroe, TX home. Stotler had been
baking cookies when Perry and Burkett arrived
unexpectedly. Perry and Burkett had come to
steal her red Camara. After shooting Stotler
twice with a shotgun, Perry and Burkett
drove to a nearby lake and dumped her body
into the water. Perry
and Burkett returned to
the home. Neither man
knew the code to the
security gate to regain
entry, so they waited for
Sandra's 17-year-old son,
Adam Stotler, to return.
Stotler, accompanied
by his friend, Jeremy
Richardson, arrived at
, the gate and was told
that a friend of his had
been injured in a hunting
accident. The four men drove to some nearby
woods. Perry and Burkett then murdered
Stotler and Richardson in cold blood. Both
Perry and Burkett were convicted. Perry got a
death sentence. Burkett was sentenced to life.
Into the Abyss is a sobering and haunting
examination of the broken minds and hearts
who became unfortunate players in this tale.
There's nothing particularly unique about
the killers or victims here. The case is tragic
and horrifying, but there are countless trag
edies like this in the news every day, equally
Michael James Peny
heartbreaking or even worse. But the brilliance
of the film is that director Werner Herzog has
an uncanny gift for drawing out profundity
and irony in the most mundane observation.
What also makes the film remarkable is that
Herzog has no pretentions to being impartial.
He is vocally anti-capital punishment, but as
Herzog also clearly states to Perry during a
prison interview just days before the execu
tion, he doesn't have
to like him nor is he
interested in investigat
ing Perry's professed .
innocence. Herzog wants
to document Perry's
stoiy, but he wants to
accurately document
everyone else's side, too,
including family mem
bers of the victims and
an executioner. From its
editing to its somber use
of musk to the some
times peculiar absurdist asides that Herzog
fixates on, Into the Abyss is thoroughly in line
with his poetk realist dramatic works and with
his great theme of humans pushed to extreme
physical and psychological states. By showing
his hand so clearly, Herzog paradoxically gets
closer to the heart of the matter better than
a more "objective" approach. As painful as it
may be, there is a strange grace imbedded in
it as welL
Derek Hill
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