Ed Gein - 2001
Directed by: Chuck Parello Starring:
Steve Railsback
Carrie Snodgrass

This one's just flat out disturbing.

It's difficult not to dwell on the facts of the true horror when reviewing a movie based on Ed Gein. Toss in realism on a massive scale and it's just that much harder. The vastly underrated Steve Railsback, who makes us uncomfortable with this socially stunted character from beginning to end, portrays Gein in this film from First Look Pictures.

[The following description may be too graphic for some readers.] In 1957, Ed Gein murdered his way to pop culture status in Plainfield, WI. Of course it wasn't the murders that did this as much as the belt fashioned from carved-off nipples, a chair upholstered in human skin, the crown of a skull used as a soup-bowl, lampshades covered in flesh pilled taut, a table propped up by a human shinbones, and a refrigerator full of human organs. The four posts on Gein's bed were topped with skulls and a human head hung on the wall alongside nine death-masks -- the skinned faces of women - bracelets made out of human skin, a shoebox full of female genitalia, faces stuffed with newspapers and mounted like hunting trophies on the walls, and a "mammary vest" flayed from the torso of a woman.

That's a horrific list and although I'm sure to catch hell from some of you for that, I want to give you a sense of watching this movie. They do not pull punches…not one. This story may have inspired a batch of other movies -- but the truth is worse.

This film does have to fight its own history of providing a well trod upon genre playground for batches of other flicks and characters such as Psycho's mother-fixated Norman Bates, Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Leatherface, and Silence of the Lambs Buffalo Bill. Railsback's Gein, and from real-life accounts, probably Gein himself, is not the monster of movies. He's not shyly handsome like Perkins, or consumed by dramatic, overt madness like the chainsaw-wielding Leatherface. He has dinner over with neighbors and their children, shops at the general store, has drinks at a bar and awkwardly tries to move through life - it's this stunted consciousness that's terrifying.

He deteriorates so rapidly after his mother's death that you can't help but wonder how something like that happens to someone - and if it can happen to a shy country farmer, then why can't it happen to anyone, you, her, me…that's what I'm talking about when I say it's hard to separate the real horror from the film horror - they're one in the same in this movie. What Ed Gein the movie does, Ed Gein the man did and you can't help but dwell on the reality of it all.