As notorious and fucked up as Gein was, he’s actually made out to be much more prolific than he really way. True, Gein killed women for their body parts, but he didn’t kill scores of them like some people think he did. His official body count is actually only two, which leaves him one short of even being classified as a serial killer by the FBI. This confusion is most likely caused by Leatherface, the star of Texas Chain Saw Massacre who was loosely based on Gein. The Leatherface house was inspired by the Gein’s – whose real-life home included a chair made of skin, a belt made of nipples, soup bowls made of skulls and a full torso suit made of human skin. Most of the parts he used came from robbing graves. Another important aspect of Gein’s wad of insanity was a severe Momma’s Boy Complex. If you’ve seen Psycho, and you have, Norman Bates’ relationship with Mom was also inspired by Gein. What Gein wasn’t was a cannibal – that’s all from TCM. He didn’t have sex with dead bodies either – that’s Dahmer’s neck of the Wisconsin woods. Gein is the star of one Macabre song, “Ed Gein” (though, in a rare miss, the band inaccurately describes him as a cannibal and necrophiliac in the song), and the Gein family stars in the acoustic ballad “The Geins”.

Naturally, Gein’s necroscapades captured a lot of people’s imaginations. Among those enticed by Gein’s story were low-budget filmmakers. One of them was Tobe Hooper, who took a little bit of truth and made a macabre masterpiece. Of course, it did make a generation of not-so-bright people believe there was really a chainsaw-wielding clan of cannibals that terrorized Texas. As if there weren’t enough reasons to avoid that state already; Texans, for example. But one group of filmmakers, the ones behind 1974’s Deranged, actually tried to do the story justice without totally skewing the truth. In doing so, those filmmakers managed to make something that reasonably resembles the way things are believed to have happened. Surprisingly, it manages to approach but not eclipse the excellence of the more dramatic, stylized TCM that shook the world’s sensibilities the same year.

Deranged is the story of Ed Gein, er, I mean Ezra Cobb. Basically, Deranged gives the Gein story the Dragnet treatment – the names have been changed, but it’s the Gein story through and through. The movie skips over Ezra’s childhood – his brother, Henry, is totally absent (it was never confirmed, but officials believed Ed may have killed his brother for his fondness of speaking against their mother, Augusta. Augusta is your classic blowhard “all women are whores and slaves of the devil” mom whose views are similar to the ones Pat Robertson uses to justify pedophilia to himself. Ezra worships his mom, but she’s dying fast. She croaks minutes into the film just moments after Ezra pounds pea soup down her throat. A gold star for whoever thought it’d be cool to have her cough up blood with a mouth full of soup.

Plot-wise, there isn’t really much to tell here. The rest of the movie follows Ezra as he digs up his mother and brings her home, develops an obsession with female body parts and kills three women. The first two murders, the first of a fat lady recommended to Ezra by his mother; the second of a local tavern employee, seem to be an amalgamation of Gein’s first confirmed murder. The victim was a missing tavern employee, but the method, gunshot, was similar to the scene where Ezra shoots the fat lady as she begs him to have sex with her under the guise of channeling her dead husband. Ezra takes care of the tavern owner by beating her to death with a femur after she throws her dead mother at him. Wait, that sentence was kind of goofy.

The third kill – Ezra abducts a young gas station attendant, shoots her to death, hangs her upside down and guts her – is accurate if you forgive the fact that the woman Gein killed was old (I think). Soon after, the girl’s family heads out to the Cobb farm, finds the girl hanging dead and bursts into the house only to discover Ezra’s household furnishings came from Head, Batch and Body. Occasionally, the plot is interrupted by a narrator claiming to be a reporter who followed the case. He saunters in and out of the movie as he pleases, delivering Coleman Francis-style narratives about Ezra’s world. The narrator has kind of a polarizing effect – some people hate him, some love him. Personally, I like the narration. It gives the film a somber feel that is needed to keep the movie serious after some extremely goofy scenes, such as a one where the fat woman holds a double date séance in which she uses her husband’s voice to seduce Ezra.

I like this movie quite a bit, but I really can’t think of anything to say about it. It’s one of those 1970s drive-in-style movies that packs a pretty powerful punch despite a relatively low use of gore, which was done by none other than Tom Savini in one of his first jobs. I also like this movie because it comes in fairly low on the Bullshit-O-Meter, which is something even the best of killer-inspired movies (see: Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer) can’t always say. Deranged definitely gets a recommendation, plus it never inspired Michael Bay to make a suckier-than-suck remake. Deranged isn’t Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and when you consider that it never inspired a Michael Bay movie, that’s one of the best things it has going for it.