Tales of the Grim Sleeper (2014) User Reviews

So many underlying issues left unsaid.

[jecal · 8/10 · 5 April 2019]

I would like to know why some of the members of the community, who were so articulate and vocal about the LAPD and their lack of interest in this case, were not just as vocal towards some of the men we met in their own community, who clearly had associated and collaborated with Lonnie and treated vulnerable women like garbage. I feel the community where Lonnie lived should have taken some of the responsibility too. How can so many women go missing? What does that say about the community? What does this say about how these "friends" of Lonnie feel about the women in their community? It's not just police gross incompetence, it's members of a community that appeared to look the other way or ignore what was happening right under their own noses and not just about the murders either.

Hats off to Nick Broomfield

[bhudson-3 · 8/10 · 2 September 2014]

This documentary is about Lonnie Franklin who killed 10 women over the course of 25 years in South Central LA.

The documentary served as an attack on the LAPD's inability to do the right thing, to investigate and release warnings to the public.

It is also a testament to Nick Broomfield's persistence, as an outsider sporting a big microphone and a funny accent he was able to wear down and break communication barriers, witnessed by the evolving stories of those interviewed. Once inside a subculture within the gnarly South Central LA district, he reveals a full spectrum voices that speak the message of outrage from victim's loved ones and their supporters, to witnesses of sexual deviancy in the form of Franklin's friends.

Typical Broomfield film

[Seth_Rogue_One · 6/10 · 20 August 2016]

You have to watch anything by Nick Broomfield with a grain of salt, never forget that this is the guy who made 'BIGGIE & TUPAC (2004)' which made almost everyone think that Suge Knight was the guy who had Tupac killed.

Which is something that today most people have changed their minds about, and people from said documentary have since come out with stories of manipulative tactics he uses to get to people to more or less say what he want them to.

Anyway he does what he usually does here, takes a camera team around the areas that were affected and start looking for people to interview on the spot.

Runs across some people that knew the 'grim sleeper' or just knew of him and asks them questions. With a lot of driving around and discussions that stray far away from the actual documentary subject at times.

One thing that struck me as weird was how many people that actually did know him (yes he actually eventually found some that did) would initially start off as saying how he seemed normal and was a good guy and then mention things about him that would suggest otherwise.

Like the ex girlfriend of Lonnie's son who initially said that 'Lonnie and his wife seemed like a normal couple, whatever I wanted I could depend on him to fix' to 3 minutes later be talking about how she could sense that he was listening to her and his son having sex and how he was a perv etc etc.

And his best buddies who'd swear that he was a good guy and that they couldn't believe the charges towards him to eventually started talking about how he'd torture prostitutes with vivid descriptions.

Like okay, do you have any sort of concept of what a 'good guy' and a 'normal' guy is or did you just change your story because Nick Broomfield wanted something juicy to put in his film and he was offering you extra money for it?

So yeah it's hard not to put on a suspicious eye here, I'm not saying that the man accused of being the 'grim sleeper' is innocent I don't think he is, but it's hard to know for sure when things get fishy like that. It is possible I suppose that even if they did get paid more for juicy stories (and Broomfield is known for paying the people he interviews) that those stories still are true.

Goes on a little too long as well.

But still decent enough to watch once.

Off the beaten track, great tension (Los Angeles plays itself)

[chaos-rampant · 22 April 2016]

The more films I see the more I hanker for a few simple things. Do we enter an interesting world, not fully charted? Can we steal an entry into life as it comes to be? Ways?

This is what I get here. Not just a documentary that traces the particulars of horrible crime - a serial killer who freely killed for 20 years has just been arrested - but a first person noir that swerves off the beaten track to investigate simmering truth.

What you'll see here is an English guy with a camera and his soundman driving around Southcentral LA or snooping outside homes to talk with people as they're trying to see how far this malaise seeps. Was it just a crazy man in an otherwise perfectly fine world after all?

Our host who shows them around is a former prostitute and crack addict, a tough street-wise woman who freely stops the car and chats with women on the street. A breathtaking sequence shows them driving around at night in search of prostitutes who may have known the killer, we find them here and there in dark streets and roll down the window to talk to them. We stop at a girl's house at night and someone is glaring from a window. During an interview, gunshots are heard from nearby.

It has all this tension, invaluable because it comes from having quietly slipped into this world from a backdoor and just prowling in search.

One acquaintance leads to another and we find a man who was paid one day by the killer to take a car out and burn it, who found bloodstained clothes in the back but kept quiet. We meet with the man's friends who insist he couldn't be the one but begin to have second thoughts. We're taken to a backroom where one of them keeps stacks of photos of nude girls who posed in shabby bedrooms or in the back of someone's car, images these guys passed on between them.

The greater insight is that all of this has been quietly taking place for decades and accepted as sleepless life, that we're seeing how the lives of 20 year olds in Reagan's time faded away. It's all in being able to see how this man who is now sharing stacks of photo albums - a catalogue of despair, both his and the women's who sell themselves for their next crack fix - is sharing what is for him a casual pastime in a life that you have nothing better to do, sleeping with hookers and keeping these mementos.

Even better; none of this would have been possible without these people being so candidly open to the camera and freely sharing stories. Can you imagine how fastidiously silent a German neighborhood would have kept? (and that's the subject of The White Ribbon)

Now we begin to see the life that give rise to this world. How many people would have been spared if they had all come forward or the police cared enough to investigate? They won't because of past experience with police, the police won't because murders in the ghetto are a triviality.

This is more valuable to me than any book James Ellroy could write or anything seen in True Detective. I'm going to go ahead and add it to my list of essential views of LA, next to Angel City, Killer of Sheep and Southland.

Not your average true crime doc

[eschase · 6/10 · 9 August 2020]

I went into expect details of the murders from the Grim Sleeper, but that's not what you get. It's more about the crack epidemic and poor police work in south LA. It's much more of a social commentary than it is a documentary about a prolific serial killer. So don't expect details of the murder, footage of the Grim Sleeper, or any of the standard serial killer documentary stuff. I was disappointed at first, but I learned a lot about how the police basically let the guy go rampant, because the victims were black crack addicted hookers. And they chose not to care.

Tales Of The Grim Sleeper

[a_baron · 7/10 · 7 September 2015]

In July 2010, Los Angeles Police arrested a man on suspicion of murder, yet to date he has languished in gaol without being tried. How come? Lonnie Franklin Junior is a suspected serial killer. He is accused of the murder of a woman in August 1985. Victim number 9 - the only known survivor - was shot in November 1988.

It was not until March 2002 that another accredited victim was found. That near fourteen year hiatus led to the perpetrator being dubbed The Grim Sleeper. Although Franklin is charged with only ten murders and one attempted murder, he is suspected of committing many more. The evidence against him, which includes DNA, looks compelling, but at the moment his lawyers are playing what some might consider an obscene game to delay the inevitable. One of their tactics was to challenge the admissibility of a DNA sample as the fruit of the poisonous tree.

This documentary does not deal with the legal case against Franklin so much as the lives of those who knew him. Interviewer Nick Broomfield is shown around the area by a former prostitute, and meets a wide variety of people, including Franklin's son, who unlike his father is not even superficially a nice person.

All but one of Franklin's alleged victims were black, and all were apparently women a long way down the food chain. This and other factors like the failure of the police to warn that a serial killer was at large has led to the usual claims about race.

This is a long documentary, but one you can watch or simply listen to while multitasking. Doubtless there will be others about this case after Franklin's trial and likely conviction. As things stand, that should begin next month, but don't count on it

Making a story where there might not be one, as usual

[allyoursphotography · 9/10 · 4 February 2015]

It's not bad - it shows that LAPD are incompetent, and that in South Central life is very cheap indeed. Usual Broomfield faux-incompetence. Can't quite prove the allegation that LAPD were complicit rather than incompetent in the non-arrest of a prodigious serial killer.

The impressive thing is the interviews, which Broomfield plays down. He can have people who were hurling insults at him tearfully recollecting, or admitting their own complicity as they realise they cleaned bloodstains or found victims.

I'm surprised some local tough guy didn't take him out, there seems to be a strange reliance on the police, who no-one remotely trusts for anything else, to solve the problem of a serial killer in the neighbourhood - looks like local people who weren't related to the victims didn't care any more than the LAPD.

A grim tale.

[punishmentpark · 9/10 · 1 February 2016]

A scary, intriguing look into the life of a(n alleged, since he is yet to be convicted) serial killer through the statements of people who knew him first hand. And that look expands to the neighborhood of South Central, Los Angeles, which almost looks like a third world country place. Very likely, hundreds of women, girls, have been abducted, tortured and killed by this Lonnie David Franklin. Considering the vast amount of evidence that was present very early on, this man could have and should have been taken off the streets pretty much straight away.

But Franklin was a man of (relative) stature, and to the L.A.P.D. most black lives appear to be not worth so much. The victims were mostly hookers addicted to crack, so he was even praised by them for 'cleaning the streets', if we may believe his son Chris. The picture that the women (prostitutes who knew Franklin, but also mothers of victims) paint throughout the documentary leaves hardly a shred of hope for the citizens of South Central. It is a community in which people seem to look out only for themselves, and in which drugs, violence and gangs get the better of many, and women like Margaret Prescod are admirable, yet rare voices for justice.

This is a grim tale, which is not over, and for the people of South Central, things are looking bleak as ever. The only positive outcome is that the Lonnie David Franklin is off the streets of L.A. forever - I at least want to assume that he will be convicted.

9 out of 10.

Tribalism.

[rmax304823 · 5/10 · 28 March 2016]

Nick Broomfield, I gather, is a well-known figure in documentary films, and he IS a little different from what you'd expect. He wanders in and out of the frame carrying the microphone and wearing earphones. He looks like a normal, middle-aged Englishman, moves deliberately, and sounds a little like Donald Crisp might have sounded as he approached adolescence. His voice is calm, dispassionate, and lacks drama. On the whole he sounds like a philosophy professor at some British boarding school, maybe Sidcot. "Next we met Bertrand Russell. Bert is a white-haired socialist. He once drove a garbage truck but is now homeless. Bert, how well did you know Alfred North Whitehead?"

In point of fact, we don't really get to know much about the suspected murderer, Lonnie Franklin. Broomfield has the invaluable help of a key informant, Pam, who takes him on a tour of South Central Los Angeles and calls pedestrians over for a few words about the Grim Sleeper. Without Pam Bromfield probably wouldn't have got as far as he did, since he's white. According to the anecdotes we get from the people on the street, Lonnie Franklin seems to have been one of those fellows who goes out of his way to help other people, although his friends do mention a few peculiarities -- a pile of stroke magazines in the bathroom, a proudly displayed .25 caliber pistol.

If we don't learn much about Franklin, we certainly get a good gander at the neighborhood and its residents. First of all, despite the bars on the windows and the gun shots in the background, it doesn't look nearly as squalid as the black ghetto near where I grew up, in Newark, New Jersey. Anybody moving from Chancellor Avenue to broad sunny Central Avenue in LA would take a deep breath and relax, the way retirees do when they finally step off the bus in Florida.

The police weren't involved in the film, so we get the African-American perspective on events. Generally, the attitudinal set is that the LAPD is incompetent and neglectful of black crime victims. There are exceptions but it's clear that there is a great big wall between the black neighborhood and the police force, as in so many other cities.

Broomfield doesn't show much in the way of political correctness. His informants speak for themselves. As an anthropologist, which is what I am, I would be very careful in taking some of their statements as literal fact.

One of the more admirable features of the film is that Broomfield, despite his narrative voice-over and his occasional intrusion into the images, is no Michael Moore. He's not one of the so-called Nouvelles Egotistes.

I regret to say that on the whole it was a little repetitious and dull. Too many anecdotes from a handful of acquaintances and relatives about what Franklin might or might not have done. It could have been pruned down to a fascinating one-hour show.

A good story ruined

[larad-19534 · 2/10 · 28 April 2015]

This documentary has so many holes. Nick Broomfield is an idiot who doesn't listen to the people he interviews. He needs to stop making documentaries. Example: He'll play a 911 call but goes no further to explain the van mentioned by the caller. Why would the killer call 911 and report his own van and license plate? He asks frustratingly DUMB questions (Often more than once per interview). He even runs a stop sign while driving around. He's inept and I can't stand the way this movie was done. Could have been great. But he made it unbearable with far more questions than answers. What a shame. These people deserve to have their story told by someone who knows what they're doing.

Interesting story horribly told

[J0ESUFF · 5/10 · 26 March 2023]

This is the story of a man who has possibly murdered over 100 women, killed over a 25 year span, people who knew him liked him and yet I found myself staring at my phone the whole time. I should have read a few more reviews before I watched, there are a few who state how the director has a history of basically coercing people into giving not false but altered statements. I don't think these people are lying, it just feels forced and awkward, not a good interview process.

It's a crazy story, one that everyone should hear but I do wish someone else would give this story a shot, I feel there needs to be more news details, police accounts, more interviews from the Black coalition that was heavily involved and just overall better editing. It's not a waste of time because it's a powerful story but it's so horribly told I can't recommend it.

5 minutes

[stevemachowsky · 3/10 · 6 December 2018]

Don't waste 2 hours of your life on this documentary. Watch the first 10 minutes and that's all you need. This could have been edited down to a 20 minute special. Waste of liffffeeee ... like a lot of the people they interviewed.