Such a frustrating disappointment

Instant Favorite.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

"Deranged," which follows a middle-aged farmer in the Midwest who goes on a psychotic killing spree after the death of his mother, had the misfortune of being released the same year as "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," another film more loosely inspired by the same real-life subject: serial killer Ed Gein. I don't mean to suggest that "Deranged" is on-par with "Chainsaw" because it isn't (and few films are), but for what it is, it is a remarkably demented and strange take on the subject matter.Roberts Blossom, a character actor who many may recognize as the creepy neighbor in "Home Alone," plays the lead role of Ezra Cobb, and is really the primary reason the film is so effective. Blossom is by turns sympathetic and utterly morally deranged; as an audience member, you want to like him, but then you are forced to watch him clinically commit horrific acts of violence.Perhaps the most unique element of "Deranged" is its clinical storytelling method which includes narration from a reporter, often within the diegesis of scenes. It's one step further than "The Town That Dreaded Sundown" (another true-story film that featured voiceover narration as well as a clinical, detached presentation), and while the presence of the on-screen narrator might distract some, there is something strangely enjoyable about it. It perhaps dampens the gravity of the subject matter a bit, but that was probably the intention.The film ends on a bit of an abrupt edge, but it stays true to the Gein story and features a horrific chase sequence through the woods of a teenage girl. All in all, "Deranged" is an effective and thoroughly oddball true-crime film greatly enhanced by the snowy locations, cold and clinical storytelling, and Blossom's equally endearing and disturbed performance. 8/10.

A low-intelligence rural man named Ezra Cobb (Roberts Blossom) becomes attached, almost literally, to his dying mother. When she dies, Ezra's attachment turns psychotic. The story is based very loosely on the real-life story of Ed Gein, Wisconsin killer of the 1950s. But "Deranged" focuses too much on the ghoulish and morbid, and gives us minimal contrast to the normalcy of Ezra's outside world. As such, the film comes across as cloistered, as well as depressing and dreary.And the plot is oh so slow. Most frames last several seconds and longer. I kept wanting to tell the director: "okay, we get the point, let's move along". You get the feeling the director is padding the plot by stretching out each scene and each sequence. The entire plot could be encapsulated into a 30-minute short film.There's little to no suspense. We see every ghoulish action that Ezra takes. Nothing is left to the imagination. His actions trend repetitive, the only difference being a new victim. The narrator, who tells us Ezra's back-story, helps not at all. His presence is unnecessary, intrusive, and annoying.The photography is fine. Colors are appropriately muted and subdued. So too is the background music, which consists of a simple piano rendition of the old gospel song "The Old Rugged Cross". That song, played in many scenes, in combo with a rural American setting, reinforces a cloistered, depressing tone, reminiscent of a bygone era.Hitchcock's "Psycho" did a far better job of telling a similar story. Despite being low-budget, "Deranged", a character study of a man's descent into madness, would have been better with a higher quality script and a different director. I get the point of the film. But for me it was simply boring.

Alan Ormsby, who of course would write another B-movie cult classic decades later with "The Substitute", brings us this Brit flick loosely based on Ed Gein. In this version, Ezra Cobb (Robert Blossom, best known for Escape from Alcatraz and Home Alone) pretty much goes completely mental when she passes on.Blossom is extremely suitably creepy throughout and anytime he's on camera the movie soars yet the flip side of that is the on screen narrator who's pretty useless and temporally brings the film to a screeching halt. Thankfully these scenes are seldom enough as to not ruin a memorable little slice of horror.

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.