Benedito Dias Rodrigues
Serial Killers always were a subject of studies around the world and this case was one's most famous bringing to screen the Ed Gein's history and according some sources the most accurate ever done...even a low budge movie is remarkable well made, Roberts Blossom incredible portrait of Ezra/Ed's character from this bizarre true facts happened in Wisconsin state and had final chapter when Ed Gein was arrested in 1957....a minor mistake is about Ed's sexuality which wasn't not clear in the movie...maybe l don't appropriately released!!! Resume:First watch: 2017 / How many: 1 / Source: DVD / Rating: 7.5
Vornoff-3
Bob Clark will probably always be remembered for directing and producing "A Christmas Story," (or in some circles for the "Porky's" movies), but for me he is the director of "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things" and the producer of this odd little gem. In spite of the lurid subtitle, there is no on screen depiction of anything like necrophilia, just a very matter-of-fact retelling of the story of Ed Gein, backed by a sparse organ score. There are elements of black humor, as when the ghoul tells the corpse of his mother that he thinks that maybe a woman he recent met "isn't quite all there" because she talks to her dead husband in séances. Mostly though, the very convincing portrayal by Roberts Blossom makes this an effective and interesting movie, better - in my humble opinion - than the better-known "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" which came out the same year and claimed to tell the same story (it didn't).
preppy-3
This movie is a (somewhat) accurate movie on Ed Gein. Ezra Cobb (Roberts Blossom) is a middle-aged man who has cared for his ill mother for 12 years. She dies and he's all alone and slowly goes mad. He digs up her body from the graveyard and brings it home. He also digs up other bodies and uses their various limbs or organs. Then he decides to go after live humans...I originally caught this on VHS back in the early 1990s. Back then it was uncut and had a doc on Ed Gein as an extra. The 2002 DVD release from MGM looks fantastic but is, sadly, edited. This got an R rating back in 1974 but the ratings board insisted that an eye gouging and brain scooping sequence be removed to get an R rating today. That makes no sense. The scene wasn't THAT graphic and it was obviously fake. Idiots. That aside this is a creepy, unsettling film. It was made on a VERY low budget and has its slow spots but it works on you. It isn't that gory either but pretty sick. There are only three killings here but there are the various rotting corpses and, at one point, Ezra wears the skin of one of them (which Ed Gein did do)! Also there's an absolutely revolting scene at the end showing what Ezra did with his last victim (a young blonde here--in reality it was a middle-aged woman). This isn't all grim and violent. There's a very funny séance scene that works well. Blossom is excellent as Ezra. It's his movie and he knows it. He shows Ezra's madness slowly growing until it overcomes him. Also there's a VERY creepy music score that adds to the unpleasant tone of the film.This is a must-see for horror fans but the casual movie goer might want to steer clear. If you can, see the unedited version. I give this a 7.
happyendingrocks
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.
