Ed Gein **
Dir: Chuck Parello
With: Steve Railsback, Carrie Snodgress, Carroll Mansell, Brian Evers
90 mins, cert 18
www.edgeinthemovie.com
Wheezing and whinnying, brooding over his collection of shrunken heads, samizdat body parts and true-life Nazi porn, peering suspiciously round the part-opened door when folk come callin', and stopping by the graveyard for unwholesome conversations with his deceased momma, Ed Gein is a character who has haunted the nightmares of American cinema for decades.
This is the true story of the simpleton serial killer in late 1950s Wisconsin, left all alone (on the death of his mother) in the remote farmhouse he was brought up in, who was eventually found to have 15 corpses in his cellar, and, most appallingly, confessed to the police that he was wont to dress up in a woman's flayed skin and dance around in the moonlight pretending to be his mom. Agricultural subsidies meant Gein didn't have to farm the land, which freed up time and energy to cultivate these interests. Is this what they mean by "the ways of the countryside"? Well, as they say in Mad magazine: yecch!
The life of Gein (rhymes with "mean") inspired Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs, together with various distinctly lenient heavy-metal lyrics; and, of course, he may have been the catalyst for the high-camp pop song about grave-robbing, I Want My Baby Back, by Jimmy Cross. Everything Ed does, we seem to have seen elsewhere recently. He is the ancestor of lots of unlovely acts of psychopathic violence, although Hannibal Lecter's predilection for flesh masks was purely the means to an end (escape) and there is one creepy little perve-out that we are spared in this movie: putting your penis between your legs and pretending to be a girl.
Now that so many film-makers have mined this richly horrible seam of Americana, what is there left for the straight biopic? Is director Chuck Parello's movie trying to achieve a pre-history of horror, maybe in the form of a deadpan, Truman Capote-ish tale, finding something of value to say in simply recounting the facts - or a lightly cooked version of the facts?
Possibly. But that isn't precisely what this film is trying to do. It marries straight period reconstruction with conventional flourishes of genre movie-making. There are scenes on the farm, in the bar, in the store and in the woods that could come from any movie - scenes in which the minimalism, the periodic lack of overt scariness seem to gesture at some sort of psychological complexity, even subtlety. But then there are the creepy flashbacks, childhood scenes of abuse and imaginary conversations with his vicious momma which are right out of the slasher text-book and whose underlying psychology is straight from the head-doctor epilogue that closes Hitchcock's Psycho.
Either way, Steve Railsback gives an strong performance as Ed Gein, the sniggering, dungaree-wearing weirdo who creeps out everyone he meets. With his hangdog air, unwashed clothes, body and hair he looks uncannily like one of the undead himself, hardly different from the unquiet souls he digs up: a not-very-animated corpse. Ed lopes around his manky, smelly house all day, reading books called Vicious Jungle Headhunters, dwelling on the grisly objects that he has assembled, and eating pork and beans from bowls that he has fashioned from hollowed-out skulls.
Parello contrives an amusing scene in which Ed shows a female neighbour around the homestead and confesses to her that he can't throw anything away: there are piles of mouldy old newspapers all the way up the stairs. In this, and in many other aspects, Ed resembles a respectable member of the real world: Charles Crumb, the pathetic, hermit-like, momma-bullied brother of the famous cartoonist R Crumb in Terry Zwigoff's classic documentary, living in genteel squalor with his mother.
The real Ed's brother appears to have died in an uncontentious fire. Parello's film turns this into an out-and-out murder when the brother reveals to Ed that he is leaving home to live with one of the scarlet hussy women their momma warns them about - and Ed kills him. The first female victim is a blowsy barmaid who gives the local good ol' boys "bra shots": removing her bra and pouring whisky through her D-cups into their mouths. Slightly predictably, this excites Ed's fascinated disgust, egged on, as ever, by the voice of his mother in his head.
So what, ultimately, is the point? It could be said that directors from Hitchcock to Demme have already picked up the ball and run with it, teasing out the dramatic and generic possibilities as far as they can go. Does Parello's version of the original events get us any further? Can it tell us anything new or complex about why it is that real people really can turn out this way?
Not really. And Parello can't resist the cheesy language of shocksploitation - like the imaginary topless Nazi Valkyrie appearing briefly in Ed's bedroom. Really, it's the same old pulpy, paranoid voyeuristic stuff, and Ed's fear and hatred of women is never that edifying. It's well acted, and effectively put together, but there is an insurmountable problem: gloomy, grave-robbing, body-chopping old Ed is, in the end, just a little bit of a bore.
