Forever doomed to be known as the 1974 film inspired by Wisconsin madman Ed Gein that isn't The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , Deranged (subtitled Confessions of a Necrophile on some more exploitative prints) is actually pretty good viewing when taken on its own merits.
Decidedly lower-key than Chain Saw, it opens with a similar "this story is true" title but, unlike its more commercially successful and critically acknowledged counterpart, actually sticks fairly closely to the real facts of the Gein case – i.e. one man, no chain saws, no single night of mass murder – even going so far as to punctuate the reconstruction with intermittent appearances – strangely reminiscent of the technique employed by Peter Watkins – by the reporter who supposedly covered the 'real life' case, providing background and jogging 'our' collective memories.
Ezra Cobb is a middle aged man, hopelessly devoted to his domineering, bed-ridden mother. She's convinced him that almost all women – fat ones like Maureen Selby excepted – are whores who will steal his money and leave him riddled with gonorreah and syphillis, "the wages of sin".
When Ma finally dies, Ed can't bear to be without her. His psychosis grows and, after a year, he digs up her rotting corpse and brings it back to the farmhouse.
But how to restore Ma to her former glory? The answer comes via some grave robbing and taxidermy. Some time later, these acts having going unnoticed in the local community where Ed is regarded as simple and harmless, his friends and neighbours the Kootz's suggest that Ed might want to get himself a woman. Maureen Selby is the obvious candidate…
So Ed goes to visit Maureen, with whom his Ma had a falling out years previously. He talks to her as though his mother was still alive, but this does not faze her, insofar as she herself believes in spiritualism and has attempted to contact her dead husband – in an in-joke film-maker Alan Ormsby is the photo in the frame – before. She thus suggests a seance at Ed's place. There, herself desparate for human contact, Maureen attempts to make a move on Ed. Disgusted, he reacts predictably and soon her mummified corpse has joined his mother's…
Benefitting from an intelligent script, generally assured direction and a phenomenal, courageous central performance from Roberts Blossom that would undoubtedly have warranted awards were it not in a no-budget independently produced horror film, Deranged makes for compelling, horrifying viewing.
Strangely, however the most disturbing aspect of the film isn't so much Ezra himself, but the whole environment within which he is possible; a milieux painted with pitch-black brushstrokes by directors Alan Ormsby – who also wrote the script and contributed to the effects work, in which Tom Savini also took a hand – and Jeff Gillen.
This is the kind of anonymous anyplace where, stopped for speeding as he's driving back from the cemetery with his mother's corpse, Ezra can explain away the trenchant stench as coming a hog he butchered and somehow forgot to remove from his pick up. Or where, calmly and seriously talking through how he wouldn't need to steal the whole of a freshly interred corpse, just her head, his neighbours can misread it all as a bit of joking.
It is as if the filmmakers have taken the banality and stupidity of a certain facet of Midwest America – still extant today if the likes of the Coen Brothers' Fargo are anything to go by – and distilled it down to something more potent than a more exaggerated movie-reality figure like Leatherface could ever be.
Indeed, while Tobe Hooper's film may be the more effective when you are actually experiencing it – it has to be acknowledged that there are few which can match here, particularly for suggesting so much but showing so little – I would venture that after the lights go out it is actually Deranged that will is likely to have the longer lasting power to disturb – not least because it remains a one-of-a-kind that hasn't subsequently been cheapened by franchising and merchandising.
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
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