Unlike the more popular movies based on Gein, Deranged tries to stick a lot closer to the facts. It begins with a pinhead mothers boy named Ezra (the names have been changed to protect the guilty)Cobb. Ezra goes completely 'round the twist after his religious zealot mother dies. A year later, he digs her up after she tells him to do so from beyond the grave. But mother's not exactly in the best of shape.
Ez tries his best to repair her using fish skin, and clay, but it's just not lifelike enough. So he turns to graverobbing to get the parts he needs. He tires of this after a while, and turns his thoughts to the living. The body count rises as Ezra's mind unravels piece by piece, and Deranged races towards its shocking conclusion.
Deranged is surprisingly good. Roberts Blossom gives a performance worthy of an Oscar as the feeble minded Ezra Cobb. This film is very black, yet has more genuinly funny one liners than you can poke a human femur at. At one point, when a woman tells Ez that she's missing the carnal aspects of her marriage, he replies "carnival?".
Bob Clark shows a lot of directorial flair with this too (surprising, given the fact that he directed Porky's), and some of the cinematography is very innovative. The whole film also has a decidedly grimy feel to it, which adds a lot of atmosphere (the main thing lacking in 99% of modern 'horror' movies, with their overly glossed over look). The Tom Savini fx, while crude, add a lot of realism.
Like genre classics such as Dellamorte Dellamore, Deranged is undisputedly intelligent horror, and one of the true classics of the now sadly defunct A.I.P studio. It's a film that even a non-horror fan can sit through, because Roberts Blossom's performance grabs the viewer by the throat and doesn't let him go. I first saw it on late night t.v. years ago, horribly cut, and cruelly interrupted by weight loss and memory expansion commercials, and I still loved it. If you haven't seen this classic yet, what are you waiting for?
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