Ed Gein is back!

DERANGED (1974)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

In the 1950's, Ed Gein, a Wisconsin farmer, killed people from a nearby town and wore their skins, sometimes dressing up other corpses. He would also use human flesh to dress up furniture. Gein was rather inept at keeping his murders secret and was eventually caught by the police. Ed Gein has been the subject of many horror films ever since, including "Psycho" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." "Deranged" is another example, a low-budget shocker with a documentary feel that proves rather cumbersome.

Roberts Blossom plays Ezra Cobb, a farmer who lives with his sickly, dying mother. She dies in her bed (violently spewing blood from her mouth) after telling him to trust only one woman in town for company. Poor Ezra is all alone since his best friend has always been his mother. Dear mother is buried, and now Ezra has an empty house to live in. One day, Ezra's neighbors tell him about the wonderful world of obituaries and Ezra, who has never heard of an obit, jokes about digging up bodies and removing their limbs and heads. The neighbors laugh but Ezra is not treating this as a laughing matter. He digs up his old mother and begins to patch up her skinless body with the skins of other dead people. Then he decides to get fresher skins and, well, you guessed it. Poor old Ezra decides to go after young women, including a barmaid that the old townsfolk ogle over. There is also the woman his mother recommended for company and possibly marriage, mainly because this woman is fat! The latter is significant in that Ezra's mother has always taught him that women are evil because they are lustful creatures, and possibly because the slender-build type are the ones to watch out for. Fat women are not as desperate for sex, or so Eza thinks.

"Deranged" is so low-budget that the mother's funeral, shot very tightly so that we see lamps symmetrically composed on each side of the coffin, is obviously not inside a real funeral home. But low-budget constraints have never bothered me too much (being that I pursued similar interests in making feature-length films with zero budget). The look of "Deranged" is rather foreboding, showing a desolate town where evil hardly seems present. That is what makes some sections of the film disturbing, and Roberts Blossom's scenery-chewing role as the lonely, banal Ezra contributes to the minimalist horror (Blossoms you may recognize as the strange neighbor in "Home Alone"). I was also glad to see very few gory murders in the film, and the blood we do see is the kind of orange red color from Hammer horror films. The murder of a hardware store female clerk is especially troubling to watch, mostly because the girl is so sweet and innocent but also because Ezra shows such a detachment from pointing a rifle at her. Some other murders do not work as well, such as the murder of the barmaid which is almost too campy. Also the murder of a psychic lady who lost her husband in a car crash is too hysterical to take seriously.

The problem is the film's narrator (identifying himself as Tom Sims, a newspaper columnist, and played by actor Leslie Carlson), who is often present in the scenes where he tells us what Ezra is thinking. The approach is to show that the story is real but the narrator also claims to be have been a reporter of the story (which is obviously not true). Occasionally, we see freeze-frames, a stylistic docudrama trick ever since 1960's "Murder, Inc.," but these devices often prove more distracting than necessary. The subject alone is grisly enough.

"Deranged" is not bad at all and worthwile for all horror film completists, or those who have an unending fascination with Ed Gein (count me among them). Though this is not as disturbing as later documents of sick and diseased minds of serial killers, it is finally Roberts Blossom's performance that will stay with you long after the film is over.