Beginning in 1984 and ending 1988, the film follows Robert Berdella, a homosexual bazaar owner and serial killer who is introduced drunkenly bludgeoning a captive man named Jimmy Howler. Bob subsequently goes to work and reads pornography in the park, returning home afterward to sell heroin to his friend Larry. Bob then invites over a drug addict, and slits the man's throat after he stumbles onto a file pertaining to Jimmy. During a game of poker, Bob serves the other players chili that is implied to contain human remains, and later sexually assaults and murders a yard worker named Mike Walton. The next day, Bob masturbates to photographs of his crimes, disposes of Walton's body, and heads out to tend to his shop, leaving a pair of junkies who he had been counseling alone in his house, which the two ransack. After selling a victim's skull to an oblivious buyer, Bob visits a gay bar, where he finds one of the addicts who had earlier robbed him. Bob entices the man into coming home with him, angrily tortures him while going on a quasi-religious rant, and gouges his eyes out before suffocating him with a bag. Bob later bails Larry out of jail, and mutilates him as well, ultimately asphyxiating and decapitating him after injecting Drano into a hole that he had drilled into the back of his skull. Bob goes on to abduct a prostitute named Cliff, who he intends to condition into becoming his sex slave. While at work, Bob is attacked by Jimmy Howler's brother, and begins suffering from chest pains. The film ends with Bob being informed that he will have to close his bazaar, and with Cliff escaping. A series of intertitles state that Bob was arrested for murder, avoided the death penalty by giving a full confession, and died of an apparent heart attack in 1992.
's Erik W. Van Der Wolf awarded the film a score of 3½ out of 5, and concluded, "Berdella is far from perfect and definitely looks like a low budget film in just about every aspect, but that didn't stop Taft and South from delivering something worth watching." Todd Martin of Horror News praised the cinematography and Seth Correa's performance, but regarded the film as "so-so" and wrote, "while I didn't hate it I still didn't really see anything special about it that would make me want to watch it again either." Writing for The Pitch, Alan Scherstuhl condemned Berdella, deriding 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."
