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Deranged (1974)

posted 3 years ago by swanstep (2619)
6 replies | jump to latest

Gap-filling, I got around to watching Deranged (1974), a fairly obscure but respectably rated (imdb score = 6.4) indie Canadian horror film from the same year as Tobe Hopper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Deranged was produced the very diversely successful Canadian indie auteur Bob Clark (Black Christmas, Murder by Decree, Porky's, A Christmas Story, etc.).

Deranged presents itself as a kind of restaged documentary (with a Walter Cronkite-figure walking around inside crucial scenes narrating what's happening for our benefit) about a thinly disguised Ed Gein figure called "Ezra Cobb" who lives in a snowbound Wisconsin small-town. I'm not an Ed Gein expert but from what I remember of the case, the details of Ezra Cobb's case in the film do track the sad, pathetic details from Ed Gein's case pretty closely. It's completely not fun at all. Cobb is obviously supremely disturbed but the townsfolk nonetheless actively try to think the best of him and to include him in things right up to the point at the end of the movie when they finally visit his farm and discover everything including female bodies hanging up like dressed out deer in the barn. I believe that this was the sequence of events around Gein's case breaking open.

Anyhow, Deranged is worth a look for Psycho fans because Gein's case is in the background of Norman Bates' story, and with Deranged we get to see all the stuff that Psycho leaves to our imagination. E.g., we get to see Cobb's horrific mother, we get to see Cobb be present at her death, bury her, fantazise that she's still talking to him, dig her up after a year, progress through digging up more recently dead bodies to killing new victims all to get spare parts and company for a restored Mama. And so on.

The version I watched, which is on youtube in high quality (albeit w. spanish subtitles):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INlk-M9LNoc
is an MGM blu-ray version from a few years ago that omits about a minute of the grossest body evisceration and restoration. The latest blu-ray edition from Arrow reinserts all that stuff. See here:
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film4/blu-ray_reviews_59/deranged_blu-ray.htm
for details. Having watched the gross, additional stuff separately on youtube, I think I can say that it doesn't add much, and that the slightly censored MGM edition is fine for most people.

[–] swanstep (2619) 3 years ago

(Cont'd) To repeat, Deranged isn't fun at all. It's not suspenseful. It's very creepy in a way that only pretty realistically depicted mental health problems and very realistically depicted terrible crimes are (Cobb's 3 key victims in the film are truly hapless and the first is nearly as sad and deranged as Cobb himself). In some ways Deranged acts as a rebuke to Psycho or Texas Chainsaw which are fun, suspenseful etc.. It's possibly rightly seen as the principal forerunner of the very grim, anti-fun, serial killer film treatises that arrived in the 1980s, e.g., Angst (1983) and Henry:Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986).

The performance of Cobb is by Roberts Blossom (who played a trusty farmer type in a key early scene in Close Encounters and a trusty homeless guy in Home Alone) and is pretty amazing. And the second key victim ('Mary') in particular is a kind of haunting, realistic counterpart to both Marion Crane and to Texas Chainsaw's final girl (who suffers though the meal with the family). For all these reasons, then, I think Deranged is worth watching for Psycho fans. But given that Deranged is close to an all-time downer and downright ugly experience, one viewing will be enough for most people.

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

For all these reasons, then, I think Deranged is worth watching for Psycho fans. But given that Deranged is close to an all-time downer and downright ugly experience, one viewing will be enough for most people.

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I remember Deranged -- didn't see it, but the clear Ed Gein aspects brought Psycho into reviews and the movie into my mind.

I'm reminded that at the 1979 AFI salute to Hitchcock, when Anthony Perkins had his turn at the podium and talked Psycho, he made the (scripted but well delivered) point that key to Psycho was that for all its horror and gore..."audiences ENJOYED it." That remains key to Psycho, I think -- it has what I call the "BOO!" factor and stays fun even as it remains horrific. (Hays Code 1960 had something to do with that, but so did Hitchcock's attention to "movie characters" -- Norman and Marion and Arbogast and the rest were interesting people doing interesting things.

Personally, I've always felt that linking Psycho -- the movie especially -- TO Ed Gein(the man and his story) is rather a false lead, a dead end. Ed Gein didn't look like Anthony Perkins and he didn't run a motel and he didn't live in a creepy old mansion and he didn't kill anybody in a shower, and he didn't kill anybody as attractive as Janet Leigh, and no private detective came to duel wits with him and get murdered. EVERYTHING that makes Psycho so interesting as a story-- isn't in the Ed Gein story at all. Beyond the dead mother still on the premises, perhaps.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

This is one of the things that distressed me about "Hitchcock" that 2012 movie about the making of Psycho that really couldn't be about the making of Psycho much at all(Universal held Fox's feet to the fire on not linking much.)

Anyway, Ed Gein(the man) weaves through the story of "Hitchcock" in sequences, interacting in fantasy with Hitchcock himself at one point. And in totally ridiculous scene(with no historic basis at all), Hitchcock plies entertainment reporters with photographs of Ed Gein's victims as a "come on" for Psycho going into production...its just too crass and gross a scene, Hitchcock would NEVER do that.

Simply put, Ed Gein DID inspire Psycho, but he has nothing really to DO with Psycho.

Gein is better connected to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, and Deranged and some movie made later directly ABOUT Gein(I think it starred the guy who played Manson.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

The performance of Cobb is by Roberts Blossom (who played a trusty farmer type in a key early scene in Close Encounters and a trusty homeless guy in Home Alone) and is pretty amazing.

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I was a big James Taylor fan in the 70s and I remember that Roberts Blossom in Close Encounters looked like "James Taylor three decades in the future." Wrong. Blossom had long hair and a moustache in Close Encounters, like Taylor back then; Taylor would go bald and clean-shaven as he got old.

Here's a piece of trivia that I read in a book and it really threw me:

Ned Beatty gave an unforgettable speech as the "biggest corporate bigshot" in Network. Its a classic stemwinder("You have trifled with the cosmic forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and YOU...WILL ...ATONE!"), it got Beatty an Oscar nomination and it should have won.

But here's the thing: Beatty replaced ANOTHER actor pretty much on a day's notice, and got that all time great scene. Beatty(who recently died) noted that it was great enough even to be NOMINATED for a role "that I took in one day and filmed in one day."

The actor he replaced went unnamed in many articles, but a recent book about Network spelled it out:

Beatty replaced Roberts Blossom!

I just can't picture it. But then I guess I couldn't Beatty til I heard him. I guess maybe this big shot was seen as an OLD big shot or something. Anyway Blossom evidently couldn't remember the lines on the long speech and had to go.

But he still has Deranged!

[–] swanstep (2619) 3 years ago

The actor he replaced went unnamed in many articles, but a recent book about Network spelled it out:
Beatty replaced Roberts Blossom!

Amazing!

[–] swanstep (2619) 3 years ago

EVERYTHING that makes Psycho so interesting as a story-- isn't in the Ed Gein story at all. Beyond the dead mother still on the premises, perhaps....Simply put, Ed Gein DID inspire Psycho, but he has nothing really to DO with Psycho [i.e. contra Hitchcock (2012)].

Good points. Watching Deranged *definitely* makes one think about the movie-ness of Psycho, Silence, and even Texas Chainsaw. Of course, suspense in general is a movie- and dramatic-technique. Insofar as you employ it (especially if you do it well) to that extent there's a pull against anything documentary- or thesis-like. I remember Spielberg getting himself in trouble with various critics (including Kubrick, Doc.-maker Lanzman, and also me at the time!) over Schindler's List's use of suspense: Will the train-load of Jewish women heading to Auschwitz make it out alive? Will the liquid pumped into their train car be Zyklon B? No! It's just water. Will we see the little red girl again? Yes! Will she live? No! And so on. From one, very strict perspective it's inherently cheapening and an immoral error to even try to make *drama* out of the Holocaust. Somewhat relatedly, Platoon (1986) got itself all tangled up according to hard-asses like myself because even as the film insists that it's giving you the unvarnished truth of what being a grunt in Vietnam was really like (I especially appreciated all the emphasis on dampness and itchiness and insect-bites!), the second half of the movie is increasingly dominated by an allegorical or mythic level with angel and devil officers fighting over Charle Sheen's character's soul. Drama everywhere!