Deranged: Confessions of a Necrophile

08/30/2015 14:21

Film: Deranged: Confessions of a Necrophile

Year: 1974

Director: Jeff Gillen and Alan Ormsby

Writer: Alan Ormsby

Starring: Roberts Blossom, Cosette Lee and Leslie Carlson

 

Review:

This film begins with a man who will be narrating; he is played by Leslie Carlson. He introduces himself as a report that followed this case and knows a lot about the events that will be shown.

The main character is played by Roberts Blossom. We learned that he kind of odd guy to begin with. His father died when he was young, so it is just him and his mother, she is played by Cosette Lee. Lee is not doing too well. They live on a farm and Blossom does everything he can to take care of her. We get kind of a gross scene where his mother tells him what he needs to know when she passes on. Primarily women are bad and that he needs to stay away from them. Blossom tries to feed her, but she ends up dying.

We then get a weird scene at her funeral where Blossom sits between two people and there is no one else there. Blossom doesn’t seem to realize that she is never coming back.

Blossom carries on like this at home. He writes her letters like she is on vacation and keeps her room the way she had it. Blossom hears her voice to come get her. He goes to the cemetery and unburies her. She has been dead for over a year and has begun to decay. Blossom thinks she is happy to see him when he opens her casket, but she is in fact dead.

He puts her in his truck and is pulled over by Robert McHeady, who is the sheriff. Blossom was speeding and McHeady asks what that smell is in the truck. Blossom tries to tell him that he has a dead hog and that’s what it is. Blossom does get his mother’s corpse home and carries on like he used to.

Blossom doesn’t farm the land anymore and he gets hired as a handyman with a local family. Robert Warner is the dad, Marcia Diamond his wife and they have two boys as well. Blossom has begun to look into embalming and taxidermy to keep his mother from decaying. He uses whatever he can to repair her, until he realizes that he can use human flesh. A teacher from when he was in school has passed away. Blossom goes to her grave and brings her home. He uses some of her skin to help fix his mother. He also begins to talk with this new woman as well.

One day while at work, Diamond and Warner tell Blossom that he needs to find a woman to settle down with. His mother told him that he can trust Marian Waldman, because she is overweight. Blossom meets with her and then agrees to have a séance, since both she and he speak to the dead. Waldman uses this to seduce him, but Blossom remembers what his mother told him and kills her by shooting her with a handgun.

Blossom goes to a local bar and falls in love with an older woman, played by Micki Moore, who has a nice body and promiscuous. She flirts with him and ends up getting him drunk. Blossom stalks her outside of her work and one night slashes her tires. He comes up then to help her and takes her back to his house, under the guise of getting spare tires for her. She waits in the truck while he goes in to get them. When he doesn’t come back out, she goes in to see what the hold-up is.

She finds more than what she bargained for inside of this house. Will Moore survive her trip or will she become his dead bride? How many more will Blossom claim? He also takes a liking to Warner’s son’s girlfriend, with the son being played by Brian Smeagle and his girlfriend played by Pat Orr. Can they save her as well before it is too late?

I learned before watching this that it follows closely to what the psychopath Ed Gein really did. So with that being said, if he did any of what happens in this film, he was insane. I think that Blossom did a fine job in the role he played. He has just enough backwoods hick and nativity to be real. The story is pretty good. There were some very creepy parts that freaked me out and had my stomach turning as well. The acting around him was good also. I also really liked the narration to kind of keep the viewers up to speed, but that also makes this film feel almost more expose/documentary than film where we see what is going on.

There were some odd-ball comedy lines in this film that I wasn’t a huge fan of, but it didn’t ruin the film though. There were some errors like when a woman is shot twice with a rifle at fairly close range, there would be more damage done than what we saw. That ruined the realism a bit for me. The film is also not all that exciting, but that could be contributed to the fact that it does follow a true story, so it can be limited somewhat. This isn’t necessarily a negative, but it is crazy that he blatantly admits to committing some of the crimes, but those he says it to think he is harmless and they laugh it off. If that really happened, that is something crazy to think about.

I would recommend giving this one a viewing. If you like the Gein case and want to see a fictional depiction of the crimes he committed. With that, this also technically a version of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which was another film based on him. This one isn’t overly scary, but it does have some creepy parts in it. The acting is pretty good and the story is as well. The pacing of this one is a little slow though, so keep that in mind. A less gory and more of a story driven exploitation film based on true events. If this sounds good, I would recommend giving this a viewing.

 

My Rating: 6 out of 10