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The title tells it all -- Ed Gein, the butcher of Plainfield.
It's not a zappy action-filled slasher movie made for teens high on energy drinks. That would fit it into a well-established genre, the kind that some people find entertaining, something along the lines of "Halloween" or "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre".
This is dark, slow, filled with chopped-up corpses, and quietly evil. There are few shock cuts, no monster's point-of-view shots, no loud electronic score. I don't know who it's aimed at -- ghouls, maybe.
Beneath the credits we already see still photos of skulls, carcasses hung up, skins draped across the backs of chairs, that sort of thing. And they're sufficiently revolting that I couldn't help thinking this movie had better be pretty good to make up for this Grand Guignol opening.
Alas, it's not. The acting is uniformly terrible, as in a high school play. The script does its best to sink below vulgarity. Ed Gein, who killed only two middle-aged women and maybe his brother, chases a screaming, bloody young woman through the Woodland of Weir, and she's wearing only a modern bra and bikini, rather than period underwear. Gein also decapitates a night watchman, which he never did in any historical sense.
The direction? You could do a better job. In the first few minutes, law officers discover an abandoned car with blood spattered all over the windshield. There is no body. The handsome young deputy sheriff turns to his boss and suggests they search for the victim, who may still be in the vicinity and living. The sheriff, lacking any motivation, shouts at him, "Now you just FORGET that! I don't want you going off HALF COCKED on anything!" It should be no more than a business-like exchange of views. Why does the director have the sheriff so angry? Characters of diverse sorts listen to radio programs or records that play old jazzy pop songs -- Louis Armstrong's "Ain't Misbehaving," for instance. This is -- what -- rural WISCONSIN in the 1950s? And the characters insist on music that would appeal to customers of the Cotton Club in Harlem in the 30s, or New York intellectuals like Woody Allen. Nope. The radio would be playing Kitty Kallen's "Wheel of Fortune" or Theresa Brewer or, equally likely, Lefty Frizell. Not that the dysfunction between the music and the events adds anything to our understanding of what's going on beneath the images. Someone involved in the production just liked old jazzy pop songs, that's all.
Of course there's only so much you can do with a low budget, but it can be light years ahead of this butchery. See "Ed Gein," with Steven Railsback for an example of a much more sophisticated way of dealing with this lunatic and his penchant for dead bodies, and on a budget that couldn't have exceeded this one by much.
These comments are all based on the first twenty minutes of the movie. That's about as far as I could get. If anyone finds this tale to be well-executed and fascinating in any way, he should try to find some insight into his tastes. It's beneath mine -- and I consider myself pretty warped.


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