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Deranged
Deranged! A perfect title, capable as best to describe this movie of 1974, by Alan Ormsby and Jeff Gillen. A
good horror which also has flashes of "black humor" but
falls on a production extremely "low budget " for its objectives and isn't
able to use as the best the material available, leaving much to the
imagination.
In
any case, for several years after its release, " Deranged "
, remains the best film on the life of notorious serial killer Ed
Gein, which is not explicitly mentioned here and which, as we know,
has inspired an endless numbers of cinema's killers.
An Horror made by situations than twists or blood, "Deranged" travels
between long silences, gaps and some sexy passage, describing a
macabre history of madness and solitude, where is inserted
also a very useful narrator figure.
The protagonist is Ezra Cobb , a shy middle-aged man, rely on the mother with whom he lives. The mum one day dies and the man tries to build a new life, unsuccesfull. The absence of the mother is too strong to the point that Ezra decides to unearth and bring her home. But
a year has clearly changed the woman, almost unrecognizable and Ezra ,a
devoted son, learn the art of taxidermy stealing corpses from the
cemetery and using the parts to "revive" the mother. Things gets worse until Ezra starts killing women.
The dark colors and the silences works good with this kind of history in which the actor
Robert Blossom gives the right depth to the
character. Blossom
was a great actor , famous for this film (seems to have been
preferred to Harvey Keitel fifteen years younger ) for "Christine" by
John Carpenter and especially (unfortunately) for "Home Alone" There is also Leslie Carlson prolific actor seen in "Videodrome " and "The Fly" by Cronenberg .
A
source of inspiration as we said is Ed Gein "The Butcher of Plainfiel "
one of the most infamous "serial killer" of history. Son of a ultra bigoted Family of ultra he became dominated by the mother, a widow with two children. When the police following the strange disappearances Gein entered the house, found a series of gruesome objects. Tables, clothes and everything else, made with skin and parts of the female body. Incarcerated in a Mental Health Institute, Gein died in 1984.
