Deranged (1974)

Deranged is brought to us by Alan Ormsby and Jeff Gillen. It's a telling of the Ed Gein story, the Plainfield Ghoul who in the 1950s shocked small town Americana to its very core.The names have been changed to, protect, well no that's not true, it's a product of its time is why, but this is an Ed Gein film, and it's a troubling and worthy piece of art in equal measure.Certain instances have been spruced up for poetic licence, but the core essence of Gein and his madness exists wholesale. Roberts Blossom plays Gein (as Ezra Cobb), a man so tied to his mama's apron strings that when she leaves the mortal coil he refuses to acknowledge said fact. Cue grave robbing, morbid scenario settings and murder.Operating on a low budget, Gillen and Ormsby do a sterling job of not letting their film come off as cheap exploitation. Tom Savini's effects work is a little crude when viewed now (he would become a legend in his field soon afterwards), but this unfurls in stylish and professional manner. With great acting by Blossoms, nifty camera work, a dark sense of humour and a chilling underplaying of key scenes leading the way, this is a fine entry in the serial killer movie pantheon. 7/10

This flick came out the same year as Texas Chainsaw Massacre but as TCM became an instant hit this became a creeper that slowly turned into a classic because so far up to this writing, this is the closest story to the real life events of serial killer Ed Gein. There were a lot of flicks about insane Ed, Psycho (1960) maybe also coming close but Deranged even as it isn't that gory after all tells us the story in details. But it's also Robert Blossom (Ezra Cobb) who gave a convincing performance that made this flick watchable. Also this was Tom Savini's second flick were he did special effects. And it shows because it took years before this flick came out full uncut. By this writing it's finally out on Blu Ray worldwide in a stunning version with lots of extra's and also full uncut which means that the brain-scooping scene is here to watch.It doesn't stand up to today's standards which Texas Chainsaw Massacre still does but it do has a few 'deranged' scene's. The blood is so typical of that era, thick red stuff running and it even runs from a nude girl hanging upside down. One of the notorious scene's and even killings of Ed Gein. Pat Orr played the full nude part and was never seen again in another flick. And I must say that she gave an excellent performance as Sally. This flick is only watchable for freaks out there who like stories about serial killers and also for those who liked the old school horrors made just before the gore came in in the slasher era. I can't say that it's slow but the horror lays in the story itself. Worth picking up.Gore 1/5 Nudity 0,5/5 Effects 2/5 Story 4/5 Comedy 0/5

DERANGED is exactly what you'd expect for a 70's horror film: campy, creepy, and entertaining despite its obsoleteness. The movie was a pet project for successful concert promoter Tom Karr and, for a while, it remained the most accurate portrayal of American serial killer Ed Gein. The names and locations have been changed and a bit of artistic license has been taken, but the core of the Gein story remains intact. The film is portrayed as a special news report or some sort of P.S.A. with host Tom Sims (Leslie Carlson) popping in every so often to feed us more details and transition to the next phase of madness. Ezra Cobb (Roberts Blossom, and the film's Gein character) lives on a farm in small-town Wisconsin with his ailing mother (Cosette Lee) who fills his head with Bible-born hatred for the sins of the world and, more specifically, the women that perpetuate them. When his mother dies, Ezra's mind snaps. He maintains some semblance of normal life with an ongoing friendship with the Kootz family and the occasional odd job, but there's a new Ezra that the town doesn't see. He removes his mother's corpse from the graveyard, brings her home, and patches her up with parts from other bodies. As his madness deepens, his obsession shifts to finding a wife and the women of this small town are in for trouble. This is a great bit of 70's exploitation with the scantily clad women and horror/violence that we've come to expect.I love that this film wastes no time in trying to gross out its audience. The sole purpose of this film is to make its viewers squirm, and it succeeds. When Ma Cobb is dying, the filmmakers were sure to give us a stomach-churning close up of the blood and thick green soup sputtering from her mouth. It doesn't sound like much, but it's a pretty gnarly sight. It only gets better as the film continues and Ezra discovers his passion for turning human body parts into trinkets. Granted, this was an exploitation film from the mid-70s with a mere $200,000 budget so the effects aren't exactly the greatest. The blood effects look like thick red paint and the corpses and bones bend and flex. None of it really comes off as real or threatening to modern audiences but I imagine people in the 70s might've been more affected. There are still some parts that can give me the creeps; when Mary is searching Ezra's house and comes to Ma's room, loaded with dressed up corpses, and finds him blending in among them with a skin mask…it's probably the creepiest scene in the entire movie. Honestly, this movie isn't going to do much to scare a contemporary audience but it's fun.Roberts Blossom as Ezra is the only one here that seems to be taking his job seriously. He actually does a really awesome job. He gives Ezra extra charisma as the town's simpleton and, for a while, Ezra's too dumb/naïve to really hate (of course, that's only until he starts carving up women). Blossom's performance is the only thing that really keeps this moving from being your average throwaway exploitation movie. He's stupid and slowly goes insane without going too over the top. The majority of the supporting cast, on the other hand, fail. Cosette Lee is laughable in her one and only real scene. It's a shame because it's her death in the beginning of the film and it's supposed to be a moment where the audience learns just how messed up Ezra's upbringing was. Lee, Marian Waldman, and Robert McHeady are the film's biggest culprit of upping the camp. I just wish the movie had taken itself more seriously as a whole (but keep Tom Sims) and think it might've been a better movie for it.

Though dozens of films have taken cues from the infamous story of Ed Gein, most of them bear very little resemblance to the true events that unfolded in Plainfield, Wisconsin. Deranged comes closer than most, but with Alan Ormsby at the helm, the campier elements here make this less a case study and more a black comedy about a witless grave robber whose story closely resembles Gein.Roberts Blossom delivers an excellent performance as Gein doppelganger Ezra Cobb, hamming up even the most gruesome aspects of Gein's deeds in such a way that this morbid subject matter becomes fun. The intentional comedy here is largely very funny if your sense of humor is as a sick as mine, and there are some real howlers here, most notably a scene where Cobb calmly eats a chicken leg at the bedside of his mother's festering corpse and speculates about the late Mrs. Cobb's best friend, "I don't think she's all there... you know... in the head". Blossom obviously gave this role a lot more thought than writer Ormsby did, and he maintains a fine balance between Cobb as a twisted wackjob and Cobb as a genuinely sympathetic character. All accounts of Gein reveal this same dynamic duality, so the portrayal here is largely on the mark.I don't think we're supposed to take any of this very seriously, but there are a few elements that seem to contradict the larger story. The most confusing scenario finds an amorous Cobb molesting a woman he's abducted, then untying her when she entices him into thinking she wants her hands free to perform sexual acts on him. Since we're reminded throughout the film via flashbacks of Mrs. Cobb that all women are "no good hoors" and that sexual contact leads to disease and death, it doesn't make much sense that Cobb is so eager to get down. Of course, the abductee's request is just a ruse for an escape attempt, which sets up one of the film's few splatter scenes, but certainly we could have set this plan into action without altering everything we knew about Ezra's character up to this point? Though there are only a couple very meager bits of splatter, the film still maintains a level of grim severity by at least hinting at some of the more disgusting elements of the source story. Cobb's house is festooned with an array of corpses and body parts, and studying the sets closely will reveal references to much of Gein's macabre handiwork. Only one scene where Cobb shows off musical instruments he's made with human parts explicitly outlines this aspect of the Gein case, so familiarity with the true story coming into the film definitely enhances the significance of much of Cobb's deranged decor.In the end, the most frustrating aspect of Deranged is the choice of the film-makers to utilize intricate true details of the real story, while ignoring other significant aspects of the case altogether. Seeing the amount of minutiae integrated into Deranged, it's obvious that Ormsby did his homework, so I don't know why he opted to change crucial facts. Those familiar with Ed Gein's story know that you don't really need to dress it up (sorry, bad pun); the realities of what occurred in Plainfield don't need any dramatic license to make them shocking and horrific.Since most of the film sticks to the story, it becomes distracting when glaring changes are inserted. For instance, in presenting the details of the abduction of Cobb's final victim, even the item Gein went into the store to buy that day is accurate (anti-freeze), but in Deranged the victim herself is about 30 years too young and has a relationship with one of the other characters that is factually inaccurate. Neither of these changes heighten the tension or make the repugnance of Cobb's subsequent deeds more acute. So why make them?Maybe I'm being too hard on Deranged for stretching the tale into the realm of fiction, since the film doesn't bill itself as "The Ed Gein Story". But, the lurid disclaimer at the beginning of the movie assures us that what we're about to see is "REAL!", and so many of the other obscure details are so well-realized that it's bound to be a let down when we get to the final credits here and realize that we haven't seen the film that definitively presents the true, unadorned story of Ed Gein. (If that's what you're looking for, check out the film simply called Ed Gein, which is not only accurate and un-sensationalized, but a great movie as well).To be fair, Deranged is by far too tongue in cheek to be that, anyway, so it fails as a wholly factual biopic. But since the underlying purpose here seems to be producing a fun little B-movie, Deranged is certainly a success in that regard. Although, much of the imagery won't have much impact today, since we've seen a lot more graphic and less primitive depictions of these same elements by now (once you've seen Nekromantik, the sight of moldering corpses around a dinner table is about as intense as an episode of Hannah Montana).The selling points here are the great performance by Blossom, a campy tone that will appeal to fans of alternative cinema, and a glimpse of Tom Savini's very first on-screen FX work. Whether that makes it worth 80 minutes of your life is up to you. I'm not overly ashamed for investing my buck-twenty.