Deranged

Inspired by the misfit life and morbid desires of the quintessential mama's boy and the granddaddy of American serial killers and transsexuals, Ed Gein, Deranged is an ultra low-budget shocker that wallows unabashedly in its main character's squalid home life, disturbed simple-mindedness and extreme necrophilia. Shamelessly tawdry, though made nearly half-a-century ago, it makes even the most lurid and sensationalized true crime accounts on today’s ID channel seem tame by comparison.

The Gein-modeled character is named Ezra Cobb, and the movie begins in the shabby Cobb family farmhouse, as Ezra’s beloved mother lays dying. Here’s her last bit of earthly advice to her worshipful son:

A year or so passes, and the desperately lonesome Ezra decides the solution to his unbearable solitude is to dig up mama’s remains and bring her back home. But even this isn’t enough to heal Ezra’s lovesick heart. To really be joined with mama, to become one with her, he needs to transition to female, so he digs up more female corpses and begins to fashion a female suit of skin for himself.

Meanwhile a do-gooder neighbor woman has a different remedy for Ezra's loneliness: she suggests the solitary oddball find a wife (a living, breathing one).  This calls to Ezra's addled mind his mama’s deathbed advice:

A bizarre date ensues, with the grossly obese Maureen staging a fake seance in which she pretends her dead husband wants Ezra to make love to his wife. At first Ezra seems to enjoy the woman's soft fat fleshly charms, but as Maureen gropes his groin, Ezra has a flashback of mama’s warnings about the sins of whoring women, and instead of pulling out his cock, he pulls out a handgun and shoots the bloated harlot.

But Ezra can't get the taste out of his mouth of that little bite he had of the forbidden fruit, and soon finds himself lusting over a trampy barmaid and then a cute high school hardware store clerk. They’re both killed in suitably demented antics, and the whole thing ends as the unconcerned simpleton Ezra is caught laughing maniacally in his rundown kitchen while his last victim hangs dressed out like a deer in his barn.

Roberts Blossom (you'll probably remember him as the scary old snow shovel dude from Home Alone) does a fine job playing Ezra Cobb as a dim *aw shucks girls make me nervous* oddball, an unusually quiet *yes sir, no sir* type who normally reveals so little when he speaks, that when he does occasionally disclose something personal, such as his fondness for digging up graves, nobody believes him.  It's a low-key performance, with Ezra's strangeness mostly expressed through awkward body language, facial tics and eye squints, with only a couple of manic outbursts to show the signs of the Psychopathia Sexualis storm brewing in his deteriorating mind.  The nobody actresses who play Mama Cobb and Maureen give the give film its few moments of pure hammy flash.    

With its sick humor, unapologetic misogyny and perversion, bleak rural landscape, suitably ugly musical score, and wonderfully rancid set designs, Deranged is a grimy pulp classic, absolutely fulfilling its ambition to roll the viewer around in the mud of aberrant behavior.