Rating: B
Dir: Jeff Gillen, Alan Ormsby
Star: Roberts Blossom, Cosette Lee, Leslie Carlson, Robert Warner
This has one of the most amusing pair of disclaimers book-ending it I’ve seen. We begin with (emphasis in original), “The motion picture you are about to see is absolutely true. Only the names and the locations have been changed.” But at the end? “This picture was suggested by actual events. However, certain facts have been altered in the production of this picture. The names of all persons and places have been changed, and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is unintentional and strictly coincidental.”. That’s having your “Totally real” cake and wanting to eat its “completely made-up” goodness too. Though I doubt inspiration Ed Gein was likely to sue the makers for defamation: “You made me a necrophile! See you in court!”
Real or not, it’s the story of Ezra Cobb (Blossom), a man in complete thrall to his mother (Lee), whose life and sanity unravel after her demise. He digs up her corpse and brings it back to the house, then begins to look for materials that he can use to keep her ‘fresh’. This eventually requires him to graduate from grave-robbing to outright murder, driven by the highly twisted opinion of women installed in him by mom. Despite the recent disappearances, his neighbour Harlon Kootz (Warner) just regards Ezra as a little strange. The reality is a good deal more twisted, and is largely why there was not a legal release of the uncut version in the UK until 2013.
This treads nicely between salacious and sincere, aided by a narrator (Carlson), pretending to be a journalist. He shows up in scenes alongside the characters, an interesting approach which works better than I previously thought. The key, however, is Blossom’s performance, which makes Ed sorry, Ezra quite sympathetic, at least in the early going. He’s depicted as not necessarily a bad person, just one who has been twisted, then left adrift, following the removal of his moral anchor. Interesting to speculate how this might have gone had the makers gone with others who allegedly auditioned for the role: Christopher Walken (rejected as too young) and Harvey Keitel. Now? Sounds like the perfect role for Bill Oberst Jr.
The salaciousness comes largely from the changes made (and, to be fair, the poster doesn’t hurt!). For instance, Wikipedia says “His violence was only directed to women who physically resembled his mother.” Hence, the last victim was, in reality, a 58-year-old hardware store owner, not a pretty, young sales assistant. The former would not have looked as good, dangling naked, blood running down over her firm, full… Um, you get the idea. Any sympathetic feelings will not last long into the second half. This goes full on into the carnage, with scenes such as Ezra beating on a human-skin drum with a femur. They will make it clear why Ed remains one of the most notorious of American killers. If not, one more sentence from Wikipedia should suffice: “Nine vulvae in a shoe box.”
[Original review] Of the films inspired by Ed Gein (not the least of which is, of course, Texas Chainsaw Massacre), this has perhaps stood the test of time best. Blossom’s performance as the central character is spot-on, managing the near-impossible task of making a sympathetic character out of a necrophiliac. There are surprisingly few laughable moments, save for the embarrassing and idiotic narrator who springs up all-too frequently in the first half – it says something that this dreadful mis-step doesn’t sink things irreperably. Instead, the movie gets grimier and grubbier as it goes on, finishing up closer to Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer than Texas. Not quite as relentless perhaps, yet still ahead of its time, and something of a pleasant surprise. B-