DERANGED: Confessions of a Necrophile (1974)
Directed By: Jeff Gillen, Alan Ormsby
Starring: Roberts Blossom, Cosette Lee, Leslie Carlson
Viewed on Prime-Great transfer!
Wow… I had never checked this one out but found that it was pretty damn entertaining to watch. This film is based loosely on the serial killer Ed Gein (though they’ve changed his name to Ezra Cobb for the film).
What we have here is the story of a simple farmer whose domineering mother dies and he just can’t recover from the hold she had on him even after her death. The lunatic’s loneliness and pain slowly turn him into a murder junkie. Ezra brings his rotting mother home after robbing her from her grave. He learns taxidermy and some embalming to try and restore his mom while having conversations with her about killing “sluts” that he can’t trust. He preserves the corpses of many other dead girls and has them all set up at the dining room table.
This is a pretty low budget movie, but the acting is good and the dark black humor kept me giggling to myself throughout its entirety. If you are looking for a lot of gore and violence you won’t find a ton of it here. It’s more deranged and creepy more than anything else (though it does have things in it that will scare you, and gross you out). Parts of this movie have that Motel Hell, or Texas Chainsaw vibe to it (just not quite as gnarly)
For me the only real bummer about this obscure classic is the TV reporter narration that they throw in from time to time to explain how things that might have gotten lost in the story make sense. It’s a cheat that really doesn’t work very well for this film. I think if the writer put more thought into the script he’d have figured out a way around needing the narration from the reporter. (NW)
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Nate Wilson: NW Devon Cahill: DC Matt Average: MA
BAD TRANSFER 