Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield is set in the small American town of Plainfield in Wisconsin during 1957 where loner Ed Gein (Kane Hodder) lives by himself on a farm after the death if his mother & brother. The local police have had a spate of grave robberies to deal with & when local barmaid Sue Layton (Ceia Coley) suspicions grow that something nasty is going on. Ed is a violent sexually deviant man who kidnaps girls & murders them, will the police figure the truth out in time to save Erica (Adrienne Frantz) the Sheriff's (Timothy Oman) daughter...

Written, produced & directed by Michael Feifer this was an attempt to base a horror film around the true events surrounding notorious serial killer Ed Gein & turns out to be pretty crap. The real life Ed Gein was only ever convicted of two murders & died in 1984 but several films have been inspired by him including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Deranged (1974) & Ed Gein (2000) with this fairly recent addition possibly being the worst Gein film ever. Even though Ed Gein was real next to nothing in this film is based on fact, Gein never had an accomplice, none of his victims were related to any of the investigating officers, there was no car crash victim, although Gein keeps his name other people have had name changes, the kidnapping & murder of the two women depicted here actually happened four years apart in reality but in this film it happens over the course of a couple of days & while here Gein is shown as a large hulking muscular man in reality he was a scrawny, thin, old & quite short. As a factual drama Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield is worthless & as pure entertainment it's no better with a deadly dull pace & feel to it, the character's are all boring & when he isn't killing someone Gein is shown working or just walking around & it's very dull. There's no suspense because we know who the killer is & it's just a tedious wait until he gets caught at the end. There is no real attempt to get into Gein's mind with the makers giving him no more motivation than him occasionally having hallucinations of his domineering mother.

There isn't much gore here, there's a scene with a woman hanging on a meat-hook, there's a really badly edited scene of Gein cutting a leg off, there's the usual jars of bodily organs & skulls lying around as well as a bit of blood but there's really not much here to get excited about. The film was obviously processed to bleach a lot of the colour out of the picture as it's not far off black and white at times, I personally think the lack of colour makes it even duller to sit through.

With a supposed budget of about $1,500,000 I can't really see where the money went in a very forgettable production. Although set in Wisconsin this was filmed in California. Kane Hodder is all wrong for the role of Ed Gein, just from a physical point of view Hodder doesn't look even remotely like Gein & he gives a pretty poor performance to as he just stares at the camera a lot making silly faces.

Ed Gein: The BUtcher of Plainfield is crap & it's as simple & straightforward as that. As either a factual drama or pure exploitation entertainment this is total tripe from start to finish with nothing to recommend it.

Sentiment: negative