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DERANGED

It's hard to imagine what the history of the American horror film would be like had Ed Gein not gone insane. Among the serial killer faithful, Gein should really be no more than a miniscule blip on the radar. His murder count stands at two women (which is two too many) and neither crime carries with it the same kind of repulsive attraction as the infamous activities of Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer or the cinemas other great villain, Jack the Ripper. What makes Ed Gein's story so compulsively, nauseatingly fascinating was his necromania. When Gein was arrested on a cold November day in 1957, police discovered the headless, gutted body of Bernice Worden hanging by its feet in Gein's shed. When they entered the home, they discovered the depths of Gein's necromania. An isolated loner forever haunted by his obsessive love for his dead mother, Gein had spent nights sneaking into local cemeteries, digging up burial plots and taking home with him pieces of dead female bodies. They found the severed heads of Gein's only two known victims in bags. Amongst his other possessions, the police found bowls made from female skulls that had sawn clean in half, lampshades and chair coverings made from human skin and a belt made from the nipples of corpses. But the most shocking thing they found in the home, the one fragment of the story which has seemed to crawl into the subconscious of the American horror film, were masks made from the faces of corpses, cleanly cut off and tanned, only the first part of a "woman suit" Gein planned on creating in the future.

Horror cinema has had a fascination with the Gein story ever since, appropriating bits and pieces in films as varied as Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO, Jonathan Demme's Oscar winning THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and Tobe Hooper's immortal THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. Oddly enough, few filmmakers have attempted a direct look at the life of the man known as The Plainfield Ghoul. Instead they allow Gein's memory to dance along the periphery, probably conscious of the fact that the material might not make for easy viewing. The two films that have tried to tell Gein's story in a direct fashion, Chuck Parello's ED GEIN from 2000 and Michael Feifer's ED GEIN: THE BUTCHER OF PLAINSFIELD from 2007, both tell the story in more or less the fashion of a docu-drama, but neither leaves any kind of indelible mark, primarily because they tend to veer more towards camp than anything close to serious psychological study. There is a feeling in both films that the writers and directors got very close to the edge of the pool and were merely content with sticking their legs in. They simply didn't want to get their heads wet.

Alan Ormsby's and Jeff Gillen's 1974 Canadian import DERANGED is one of the films that skirt the line between camp and seriousness in its retelling of the tale. It presents itself more along the lines of a made for television expose, adopting the look and feel of a dramatic re-enactment. Beginning with a disclaimer that tells us that "the motion picture you are about to see is absolutely true! Only the names and the locations have been changed" and featuring an on-screen narrator whose sole function is to provide us with enough exposition to get us through to the next bit of nasty business, DERANGED decides to use the Gein story as a freak show and little more. By reducing the story to only the more scandalous bits, it resembles a bit of true crime writing that isn't so much concerned with the "why" but the "how". This is the Ed Gein story mixed with the carnival attitude of a H.G. Lewis film.

Ormsby keeps the story more or less true to the facts of the case. We meet Ezra Cobb, our Gein stand-in, at the bed of his mother, an old Bible-thumping, woman-hating bitch who has convinced Ezra that every woman in the world is a greedy, diseased whore. Once his mother dies, Ezra is left on his own. Months go by. Overcome with grief, Ezra hears his mother's voice telling him to come get her. So he does, digging up her body and bringing the corpse home. Soon enough, Ezra is plundering the graves of corpses for fresh body parts and companions. A couple of his neighbors decide to help Ezra get a woman in his life. Ezra meets with Maureen, a widow who was a dear friend of his mother. Maureen is just as batshit crazy as Ezra, speaking to her dead husband on a daily basis. When Maureen tries to take advantage of Ezra in the most non-sexually appealing kind of way, Ezra kills her. From that point on, Ezra develops a fixation on women. He turns his obsessive attention to a local bargirl named Mary. One night, he slashes her tires then waits for her to get off of work. He offers to drive her into town and she accepts. But then Ezra makes another offer. He has a few spare tires at his place and can save her a great deal of money by replacing the tires himself. Thinking Ezra is just a harmless man, she accepts the offer. Only when they reach Ezra's home, he disappears inside. Mary, fed up and wanting to go home, goes to look for him. She enters the home and finds Ezra sitting in his mother's bedroom, surrounded by corpses and wearing a mask made of dead skin.

That sums up about half of the very short running time of DERANGED. To complain that the film does not provide a real sense of Ezra's inner psychology would be to miss the point of the film, as would any complaints that the filmmakers embellish the Gein story from which it was derived. What DERANGED sets out to do is simply provide a kind of geek show, something we can point at and gasp and gawk. The deliberate element of camp, along with the television dramatization presentation, makes any real sense of outrage we may have had over the proceedings impossible (Ormsby and Gillen also keep most of the violence off screen with only one scene of Ezra cleaning out the brain from a skull being shown). The real measure of Ormsby and Gillen's success comes from how strange the film is. It is really unlike any other film of its kind. It is more broadly comedic than THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (itself a black comedy based on the Gein story) but less horrific. But the film contains just enough rough material to keep it from tumbling completely into the realm of comedy. It is a strange film. It really is. I have a hard time really categorizing it, probably because of how well the disparate elements are balanced.

Robert Blossom's excellently weird portrayal of Ezra (a truly remarkable concoction of facial tics and body language) creates a character that is both sympathetic and terribly hilarious. Watching him try to come to terms with Maureen's sexual advances, fumbling his way between repulsion and attraction before finally lapsing into bloodlust, is a minor miracle of weird cinema. We may never feel threatened by Ezra himself but we're never allowed to forget that this is a very sick man. There's a wonderful scene near the end of the film where Ezra, smitten with a young woman named Sally who works as a clerk at a small thrift store, casually targets her through the scope of a hunting rifle. Blossom's performance is simply remarkable here as his sexual lust, so confused with his sadism to the point where the two have formed an unbreakable bond, boils over. The look on his face and the way he carries out the shooting contains a whiff of what this film could have been if it decided to play it straight. The chase that follows this scene and the calm, matter-of-fact way Ezra mutilates the body once he has it in his shed adhere to the standard horror formula, bringing to a close a film which had been up until that point harmless, even if it wasn't all that pleasant.

With so little of Ezra's nasty business on screen, Ormsby and Gillen saturate the film with other forms of age, death and rot. For example, aside from Mary, Sally and his friend's son, no one in the town seems to be under the age of fifty. The film itself feels cold and aged, shot in harsh lighting with little visual embellishment. Ezra's home is filled with old food, rotten vegetables, empty cans and tins. It has a slight verite look to it (keeping in line with its TV dramatization presentation) that extends the subject matter into the visual vocabulary of the film itself. The atmosphere on display is oppressive. While light on bloodshed, the special effects (provided by Ormsby and Tom Savini) are rather well done, conveying a good sense of the putrescence and grime that Ezra found happiness in. While very obviously a cheap film, DERANGED feels much more professionally made than other films of its ilk. The look of the film feels calculated to provide the kinds of sensations that would normally be delivered by the narrative, that feeling of despair, of isolation, of death and aging. Were it not for the humorous moments, DERANGED would be unbearable.

This really is a one of a kind film. I've trekked my way through a lot of low budget independent horror films and I've never seen anything quite like it before. It feels unhinged and damaged in a way most low budget films would envy, yet the humor of the film somehow elevates it above the waves of madness. The two elements don't clash. They enhance each other in very strange ways. The humor acts as a kind of defense mechanism, shielding us in a way from the poison lurking below the surface level of the film. While Chuck Parello's ED GEIN also camps it up from time to time as a relief from the true life narrative of events, it attempts, by and large, to play the story straight. When we compare the two films DERANGED feels like the stronger piece, even though it contains relatively little strong imagery. I think that is because the story of Ed Gein stretches our ability to rationalize necromanic crimes and murder to its limit. Sometimes there are things in life that are so gruesome and inexplicable, so depressing and filled with despair, that the only thing you can do is laugh or go insane. DERANGED allows us to do the former while wallowing a bit in the latter.

Highly recommended.