Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-10502460-20190514105310

Let me preface this by stating right off the bat that I don't really expect to find any answers here. I've copy-pasted the gist of this post to dozens of forums and this place is pretty much my last resort. Then again maybe it's for the best if I don't find what I'm looking for.

When I was, well, younger than I am now, I went through a phase where I was really into shock exploitation and gore movies. I'm not proud of it, and I won't go into details about what kind of underlying psychological issues I may have had at the time, but it's essential that you know this about me for the context of this post. It started with basic slasher and body horror movies. When those failed to deliver enough adrenaline after a while, I started seeking out "real" stuff. I watched the infamous "Vignettes of Death" mondo documentary from 1978 and its various sequels and spinoffs, then got into even more extreme stuff.

Look, I'm starting to feel pretty slimy just typing this, so I'll leave it at that. The point is that in 2008 I found out about a certain film through a certain online gore site I was involved with. It had been circulating for a few days among various horror and shock material communities. Many people, hardened gore veterans, said it disturbed them more than anything they had previously seen, and that it "makes Vignettes of Death look like a Disney movie." After watching it myself, I agreed.

Now, if you're nervous about continuing here, I can at least assure you that what I'm about to describe isn't some ultra-horrific torture or cannibalism scene or any other such "you don't even want to know" type of material. That said, if you consider yourself to be particularly faint of heart, you should probably stop reading now. This is the movie that permanently turned me off shock-gore and exploitation videos, and that's saying something. Again, there's nothing that will make you vomit all over your computer just from reading about it, but it was disturbing on a much, much deeper level, a level I can't quite convey just by writing about it.

You may be wondering at this point why I am trying to find this movie again if I'm over my gore craze. Well, it certainly isn't because I want to watch it again. You shouldn't either if you find it. But I want to track it down nonetheless, because someone needs to look into the origin of this thing.

The film was titled "Broken Windows" and purported to be a 1987 documentary about Chicago gangs and urban dysfunction. The title card was simple white-on-black text that read "Broken Windows: A Crookland Films Production." If anyone has any information on a "Crookland Films," please message me even if you don't know about the movie in question, because I have not been able to find any information about them.

The title card was followed by text that read "More than 800 people are killed in the City of Chicago every year. That number is expected to rise over the next decade."

The film opened with interview footage of a young black man. Most of the people featured throughout were black so I won't make note of it beyond this point, but there were whites, Hispanics, and Asians as well. "I used to do dirt in LA. When I moved here to Cook County, I thought I was gonna come in and show them others how we did things, you know what I mean?" he began.

"But I got checked real quick. Gangs here ain't nothing like what it was in LA. They do it different here. It's everyone for himself in the end."

This opening clip really set the tone for the feature. The film had no narrator, and context to the various clips shown was only given by these sporadic interview clips and the occasional brief text overlay. This was the first chilling aspect. The interviews were all so real, and by that I mean they were raw and honest. The year 1987 was just a little bit before the rise of gangster rap culture, so no one was "fronting" here. No one was playing up trying to come off like NWA. It was just brutal, honest descriptions of gang life in Cook County, and when someone was interviewed who said he (always he) killed people, there was no reason to believe they were playing a part.

The next clip was of a burning house. A woman could be heard crying off-camera that her child was inside. Text faded in, one line at a time:

There are many areas of Chicago that first responders are afraid to travel to.

Even in the middle of the day, residents may be left to their own devices in case of a fire.

It will be another 40 minutes before a fire engine arrives here.

This sent a small chill down my spine. Still, I wasn't understanding why this movie was being shared on gore sites.

The clips did get more graphic though. Disturbing footage of violent crime, domestic violence, and the horrifying consequences of drug abuse, all shown in minimally-edited handheld footage. Shootouts, suicides, gang initiations, none of which was censored in any way. Not all the scenes were graphic and violent, but those that were showed it all. Objectively, it was nothing worse than what I had seen in "Vignettes of Death", but there was something about it, something I couldn't place, that made it ten times more haunting.

There were many clips, but I'll give a brief rundown of some of the ones that stick out in my mind the most:


 * A parole officer arrives at a house to arrest a man for a violation. The man shouts through the door at the officers that he will never go back to prison. I gunshot is heard, and the officers storm in to find that the man has ended his life.


 * A young teenager is taken for a car ride to do a drive-by shooting as part of his initiation. The camera films from inside the car with several gang members. They pull up to the target's house. The target comes outside and begins arguing with the gang. For whatever reason they decide not to go through with the shooting and drive off.


 * A black man who looks to be in his early 50s is interviewed about his gang experience. Like the other interview clips, the interviewer is not heard. The man says he fought in Vietnam and formed his gang with several returning veterans of color.


 * A cop pulls over a man with a broken tail light. During the stop the man attempts to flee and is run over by a dump truck.


 * A young white man with blonde hair and earrings is interviewed. He is 18, has a posh British accent, wears a white sweatshirt, and looks like he belongs in a 90s boy band. He talks about how he grew up in a wealthy family but moved to Chicago to join a white gang out of boredom. He says he enjoys killing "darkies" and hopes to open a brothel.


 * A woman on drugs is shown having a miscarriage at a hospital.

After a while I realized why these clips stirred up such dread in me. I don't know if anyone else had realized it, but they were all filmed with the same type of camera. There was no difference in properties like aspect ratio, and the style of filming was the same. What's more, no one ever seemed to acknowledge the camera or the person holding it. Whoever was holding it was never heard or seen and did not appear to be invested in any of the events they were recording.

The scene that haunted me the most, that still haunts me the most, was of a man who tried to rob an undercover narcotics officer at knifepoint. When the cop punched him and tried to make an arrest, he dropped the knife and pulled out a gun. I guess the gun was only for emergencies and he thought using a knife would get him less prison time if he was caught.

The man backed away from the cop and started running, eventually carjacking someone and leading the cops on a chase. The chase was filmed from different angles yet did not appear to be staged. The man crashed into a tree near what looked like a college campus and got out. He grabbed a woman who looked to be pregnant and held his gun to her head.

The cops tried to talk him down. The camera zoomed in on his face. Within moments, either fear or guilt overtook him, and he released the woman.

He dropped the gun just a split-second too late. One cop fired, knocking him to the ground. The camera zoomed in on his face again, clearly dead. The officers began swarming around the body. I could hear one of them swearing off-camera and muttering that the deceased could not have been older than 16, 17. "They get younger every year," he said.

After I finished this movie, I felt like my whole soul had been emptied out of my body. I knew right then that I would never watch another shock film again. All the upload and download links disappeared within days. As far as the few people who knew about it could tell, the whole Web had somehow been scrubbed clean of it.

I wasn't completely honest before. The scene where the carjacker got shot was only the second-most chilling. The worst one was the last scene in the documentary, after which it abruptly ended without credits. It was silent security footage of an alley, the only clip in the whole film that was not recorded on the handheld.

A man was walking alone down the alley. He was wearing the same clothes as the man in the interview that opened the movie, and I could tell it was him.

He was stopped by two others who emerged from an alley door. He tried to run, but was shot in the back. The two men left, and the footage ran as the deceased bled out for many minutes afterward. Just before it finally ended, a dark figure appeared and disappeared in the blink of an eye, hovering over the corpse. It looked like the figure was grinning.

You know, in a way I'm glad I saw this thing. Like I said, it broke me of my previous viewing habits, and now I have the comfort of being able to react with appropriate disgust whenever I see graphic violence, something which I did not realize how bad I missed until after this experience.

If anyone has any information on this documentary or Crookland Productions, please PM me. If you find the movie, send it to the police, send it to the news, send it to the FBI, but whatever you do, don't watch it. 