Sympathetic is a dangerous word to throw around when dealing with a thinly veiled biopic of notorious \u00a0patron saint of serial murderers Ed Gein.<\/p>\n
Released the same year as that other gristly grindhouse classic that uses Gein’s rap sheet as its starting point, Tobe Hooper’s The<\/em>\u00a0Texas Chain Saw Massacre<\/em> and Jeff Gillen and Alan Ormsby (Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things<\/em>)’s\u00a0Deranged: Confessions Of A Necrophile<\/em> are kissing cousins (a fitting cliche for a twisted clan), but while both employ hand-in-mouth dinner table torture scenes and a penchant for human leatherwork, Deranged<\/em> is a stranger beast.<\/p>\n It’s no less shocking, no less brazen, but perhaps far less involving than 1974’s other great backwoods murderspree.<\/p>\n Deranged\u00a0<\/em>confronts the minutiae of the Ed Gein case head-on. Where Chain Saw<\/em> creates its own world of meathook slaughter and buzzing flies, Deranged<\/em> swaddles itself in reality – the names and locations may have changed (along with some of the ages), but Ezra ‘Ez’ Cobb (Home Alone<\/em>\u00a0and Escape From Alcatraz<\/em>‘ masterful Roberts Blossom) and Woodside are the thin gauze stretched across the weeping controversy of Ed Gein and his home of Plainfield, Illinois.<\/p>\n Early makeup work from Dawn Of The Dead<\/em>‘s Tom Savini accompanies the death of Cobb’s fire and brimstone-barking hellbeast of a mother (Cosette Lee) in a slurry of blood and pea-soup. With one last warning about the wickedness of women ringing in his ears the isolated and coddled Cobb struggles to cope with his loss, a year later stealing the body from the grave, and then others, and then turning his attention to live prey to fill that void in his life – that yearning for feminine comfort and affection that eventually leads him to stitch together his own Buffalo Bill woman suit.<\/p>\n Blossom may have distanced himself from the film later in life, perhaps the eyeball-scooping sat ill with his more respectable roles, but he tenders a performance that is compelling, his gleeful smile disturbing and his flinty withdrawal disconcerting. It’s a standout performance from an actor who would build a career on saying much while speaking little.<\/p>\n Narrated by The Fly<\/em> and Black Christmas<\/em>‘ Leslie Carlson who wanders from scene to scene as a news reporter, linking up the story’s disparate dateline like a Crimewatch<\/em> reconstruction. As a framing technique it does the job but the sense of artifice and the surrender of pacing breaks the spell cast by Blossom and scatters the plot.<\/p>\n Of the three set-piece murders, one is iconic – sublimely shot as a camera follows waitress Mary (Short Circuit 2<\/em>‘s Micki Moore) down the darkened corridor and into Cobb’s den of horrors – one is genuinely tense and terrifying as the delicate Shelley (Pat Orr) flees through the snow-capped forest screaming for help that’s forever round the corner – and one feels like a Monty Python sketch as the grasping \u00a0Maureen (Black Christmas<\/em>‘ (Marian Waldman) holds a seance in which her dead husband (through her) encourages Ezra to give her a seeing to. Blackly comedic without ever really being a black comedy, and chilling for instances without ever holding the tone and building on it,\u00a0Deranged: Confessions Of A Necrophile<\/em> – while plenty of fun – is as mismatched as Ezra’s cadaverous ladysuit.<\/p>\n
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