A Certain Kind of Death (2003)

Author: Old Mother Hubbard

“A Certain Kind of Death” (2003) I realized I had seen this one as I was watching but it’s only 65 minutes so I watched it again. It’s a critically acclaimed documentary with rave reviews. There is no doubt that it is interesting. It discusses what happens to dead people and their belongings when they have no next of kin. The documentary focuses on 3 dead bodies that were found in varying degrees of decomposition. I don’t envy the people who have to do this job. One body was covered in maggots and stunk to high heaven. Another body was found in a filthy apartment that was teaming with thousands of cockroaches.

After my grandmother died I had to sort through her things to find needed paper work. She was in her mid thirties during the height of the great depression so she developed a habit of hoarding. Her house was filled to the ceiling with stuff. It took me over 6 months to sort through her stuff to find the required paper work. My mother got her hoarding traits through my grandmother so when my mother died I had to go through the same thing searching for her paper work. The people in the documentary have to do this for a living everyday with the dead stranger’s paper work and belongings, detailing every item. That part of the documentary was a little tedious for me.

What I found fascinating in the documentary was the cremation procedures. It shows cremations from soup to nuts, with the workers crushing the burning skulls in to ashes. Dead people with no next of kin have their ashes put in to metal boxes and are stored away. If no one claims them in 2 years their ashes are put in to a mass grave. Something odd about the procedure is that they save the metal boxes so workers have to dump the ashes in to the mass grave while dead body ash is flying all around them. There were 1,600 people put in to one mass grave at the end of the doc so you can imagine how much dead body ash was flying around. I kept thinking there must be a better way.

Anywho, it’s a really good doc. Pretty gruesome at times. IMO it’s slightly boring because it’s basically just people doing their somewhat routine jobs that they do everyday. I almost nodded off once or twice. 4 stars.

There you have it. Another stunning and incredible review from the king of EUM, yours truly OMH.