Friday, March 5, 2010

Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield (2007)

Is it totally wrong that I think Kane Hodder is sexxx-ayyyy?  This is what was behind the Jason mask all those years?  Hmmmm, I was missing out.

Anyway, I know this movie has gotten a lot of shit.  I can tell you right now that the main problem with this movie was naming it "Ed Gein."  This movie was actually watchable, but it just wasn't really very representative of the story of Ed Gein.

As most horror fans know, Ed Gein was a scrawny weird loner who was obsessed with his mother.  He dug up bodies from the cemetary and played around with them and even killed a few people.  His story was the inspiration for characters in Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Silence of the Lambs.

Kane Hodder ≠ Ed Gein.  He is big, muscular, scary, and the aforementioned dead sexy.  The innaccuracies of the story were glaring.  So I'm going to stop comparing it to actual Ed Gein because there's no reason to.  The movie follows a loner living on the edge of town (they say this about 27 times) who is sad about the sickness/death of his mom.  He also has a little hobby of digging up corpses with his friend Michael Berryman. 

Women seem to seriously tick him off, and he feels the need to kill them.  He also kills anyone who gets in the way of his little errands.  In addition to the grave robbing and farming, it seems like Ed Gein has a really full schedule.  He is also doing some arts and crafts on the side by making a full woman-suit.  On the other side of things, we have some bumbling cops including an idiot detective that takes his airhead girlfriend on police business with him.  There's no wonder it took these morons so long to figure out why women and corpses were going missing left and right.

There's was lots of kind of soap opera stuff going on this movie with lots of background on the supporting characters and pretty much zero on the main one.  That said, this movie wasn't totally unwatchable but they should have just dropped the comparison to Gein and just made it another ripoff.

2 comments:

Andy said...

You should also check out Deranged (1974) for a slightly more accurate portrayal of the Gein story, starring the wonderful Roberts Blossom! Let us know whatcha think!

The Scream Queen said...

@Andy: Putting it on the queue now. I've seen Ed Gein/In The Light of the Moon and it left a bit much to be desired.

@Jeremy: Yes, I do and I stand by it. Plus he got those burns in a badass way ;o)