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Excellent but underrated film

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

"Deranged" is a classic rural shocker that stars the excellent character actor Roberts Blossom as Ezra Cobb - Ez, to his friends. Ez goes off the deep end when his beloved mother (Cosette Lee) dies. He can't bear to be apart from her, so he brings her corpse home from the cemetery. Realizing that her body is in bad shape, he starts robbing other graves to help treat her body the best that it can be treated; he also brings home corpses for the "company".Blossoms' superior performance, which enables one to sympathize, as much as is possible, with this insane person, makes this a must see. It's also noteworthy for being one of the earliest makeup effects credits for a young Tom Savini. Also on the makeup crew is the screenwriter Alan Ormsby. Ormsby and his co-director, Jeff Gillen, were associates of the filmmaker Bob Clark; they'd also done "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things" and "Dead of Night" together. While the pacing is awfully slow at times, Ormsby and Gillen give "Deranged" wonderful rural atmosphere.The makeup effects on this show are pretty good for low budget fare; fans will be pleased to note that the recent Blu-ray release includes a long excised scene of eye / brain scooping.Ormsby based his screenplay on the real life exploits of the notorious Ed Gein, and apparently this version has been one of the most faithful to the true story for over 40 years now. Buffs, of course, are already aware that Gein also inspired such favourites as "Psycho", "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre", and "The Silence of the Lambs".The supporting cast - Robert Warner, Marcia Diamond, Robert McHeady ("Cannibal Girls"), Marian Waldman (the original "Black Christmas") - are good, but this is almost entirely Blossoms' show.Some people take issue with the presence of the newspaperman / narrator character Tom Sims (Leslie Carlson, "Videodrome"), which admittedly is not really a necessary element.Good stuff overall, but the ending is awfully abrupt.Seven out of 10.

Deranged is a very low budget , but very effective and extremely creepy horror movie based on Wisconson serial killer Ed Gein. Other horror movies and thrillers have been loosely based on Ed Gein 's exploits , such as Psycho, Silence Of The Lambs and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.(which was released the same year as Deranged ) Deranged is heavily based on Ed Gein and is a character study of his psychosis and downward spiral. Ezra as he is called here is played wonderfully by Robert Blossom as he loses his mind after his mother 's death.Ezra goes from bad to worst from digging up women's graves to murder. This is far from as gory or extreme as the filmmakers can go with this. However, I found this to be very disturbing and creepy with a touch of dark humor for good measure. Definitely well done and I'm sure Deranged shocked audiences on its release in 1974.Great film.

Deranged is a horror comedy with a grim subtext, tracing the activities of Ezra Cobb, a yokel serial killer who likes his ladies nice and dead. The film combines the horror comedy of films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with a much grimmer character study presaging works like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.Cobb is a man torn between his desire for women and the dictates of his deceased mother, a religious fanatic with an insane distrust of other women. His mother's misogyny combines with a fascination for corpses to produce horrific results.Robert Blossom's performance as Cobb makes this movie a minor classic. He captures both the comic aspects of Cobb, such as his naive statements of what he is doing to neighbors, along with the more disturbing aspects of his personality. Indeed, the last ten minutes of the film show Cobb wrestling with both his perverted desires and his Mother's commandments. In many respects, he turns Cobb into a sympathetic, if not an outright tragic figure haunted by childhood abuse.The film is complemented by some early effects work by Tom Savini. These effects are somewhat uneven, given the limited budget that Savini had to work with. Some of the corpses look better than others, and the blood is clearly red paint. However, Savini definitely shows his talent and early promise.The film's most divisive element is its narrative structure, which makes use of a reporter narrator (played by Videodrome's Les Carlson). On one hand, this device adds to the film's comic value, as Carlson calmly narrates in the same room as Cobb talking with a corpse. However, the narration also takes us out of the film, making it less disturbing than docudramas such as Henry.Overall, the film makes for a fun viewing and should be on the list of every horror fan.

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.