The Scope

“I’m sorry I called you a hog, ma.”

What kind of horror movie is it? Pre-Halloween proto-slasher.

Before the various “true crime” documentary-style programs that Bill Kurtis would produce for the A&E network, people experienced serial killer stories the way God intended: fictionalized movies! Why dwell, polish and streamline reality when writers could take the info and legends about a serial killer and weave them into entertainment?

Names changed to protect the innocent and all that. This was entertainment, not news, after all.

The most famous and recurrent example of this would be the many fictionalized accounts of the notorious Ed Gein. Gein was a necrophile, cannibal and killer of women who wore his victims skin among other disquieting thing. From the notoriety of his activities and arrest sprang a mini-genre of horror movies that latched onto aspects of Gein’s habits and retold them. These Gein-sploitation pictures fashioned a pathetic, disturbed creature into a modern boogieman. He would go on to inspire Norman Bates, Leatherface, Buffalo Bill and other cinematic slashers with his revolting deeds.

Deranged is a dramatization of the Ed Gein murders overshadowed by its more famous, Gein-inspired brethren: 1960’s Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which came out the same year as Deranged. Deranged was truer to the Gein case than either Tobe Hooper’s film or Alfred Hitchcock’s.

In this depiction, Gein is Ezra Cobb (Robert Blossom), a simple resident of the sparsely populated town of Woodside, tending to his dying, lunatic mother (Cosette Lee). The docile Cobb listens to the furious exclamations of his mother as she warns him about women who are carries of the three great evils: “Syphilis! Gonorrhoea! Death!”. While he is to be wary of the opposite sex, she advises her son to trust only family friend Maureen Selby (Marion Waldman) because she is obese and a “heifer” is an exception to the rule. When Ma Cobb finally gives up the ghost, Ezra is devastated. He spends all his time at home crying and talking to himself. He also begins writing notes to his ‘vacationing’ parent, where he repeatedly asks when she’s finally going to return to him.

Finally, he decides that if the late Ms. Cobb isn’t coming home on her own two feet, he’ll have to dig her up himself, smuggling the body under the cover of night and laying his mother’s remains on her deathbed. However, a few nights of decomposition have been Hell on Ma Cobb, so Ezra takes it upon himself to not only preserve what’s left of his mother and prevent further decay, but to seek new flesh to restore her body, starting with Maureen Selby…

Deranged had initially disappointed me when I first watched it. Indeed, there is a clumsiness to the film that is hard to ignore, largely in the form of a reporter who functions as the film’s narrator played by Leslie Carlsom. Yet, instead of relying on voice-overs, film uses a remarkably goofy framing device of having the reporter just pop into frame throughout its running time. So, poor Ezra will be babbling to his dead mom or making his first kill and suddenly this Les Nesman-type will pop into frame to remind us about the horror of it all. The camera’s sudden pans to this guy are influenced by Rod Serling’s onscreen bookends in The Twilight Zone, but have no power here. Carlson’s not so much Sterling as he is Count Floyd, giving the film a very hokey vibe.

Unbelievably, this actually improves the film if you know its coming. Its a nasty combo of lazy writing and bad acting, but the surreality of Robert Carlson popping into frame like some kind of crime-reporting elf gives the film an unpredictable quality. You’re never quite sure when Carlson will show up next, but his appearances (and the Ezra’s ignorance of them) give the film an unintentionally lunatic quality that enhances the portrayal of its killers insanity. Similarly, when the film tries to derive horror from someone other than Ezra, it results in unintended laugh. When Ma Cobb’s “Syphilis! Gonorrhoea! Death” is looped on the soundtrack, I nearly peed my pants. Still, these failings, combined with the film’s stagy, matter-of-fact direction make Ezra’s degeneration all the more frightening.

The one thing that always stayed with me from Deranged was Robert Blossom’s stand-out performance as Ezra. Most of the acting ranges from unconvincing ham to am-dram theatrics, but his performance is so slight, it’s invisible. Blossom effortlessly weaves the bashful, childlike nature of Cobb with his demented compulsions. In a film that almost drowns in its artificiality, Blossom’s quietly determined, lonely madman creates a very real sense of menace. One can only hope that the late John Hughes cast Blossom as the creepy neighbour in Home Alone based on his performance here.

If you’re intrigued by Gein, or the real story behind that creepy guy who terrorized Macauley Culkin back in ‘1990, Deranged is a must-see.

Availability: Once available as a double-feature with Motel Hell, Deranged has fallen out-of-print, but used copies of that DVD aren’t hard to spot.