D2D entry #53: Deranged (1974, Jeff Gillen & Alan Ormsby)
(Featured in Dusk to Dawn #3.)
Forever destined to be overshadowed by another, slightly more famous 1974 release based on the case of Ed Gein, Deranged is nevertheless worthy enough of consideration to deserve the minor-classic status that has slowly crept upon it since the onset of the VHS years. Gillen & Ormsby till similar ground as the famed Hooper film, but it’s all in the approach. Where Hooper sets up a bland everyday feel only to shatter it with an indelible, unending nightmare, Gillen & Ormsby keep their film resolutely banal. So while it’s not the most terrifying film ever made, Deranged is an odd bird that nevertheless gets under the skin. Its potency would be even more pronounced had the filmmakers not intentionally inserted a distancing device — Deranged is structured like a true-crime tale complete with brown-suited narrator, and his occasional intrusions into the frame serve only to remind the viewer that, hey, maybe it’s based on truth but this is only a movie so don’t get too worked up. It’s like Gillen & Ormsby stepped back, looked at their material and got scared by it, so they felt the need to defuse it a bit. (They’re not the only ones, either; frequent Ormsby collaborator Bob Clark reportedly declined the offer to direct because he felt the material too gruesome and disturbing.) What we have here, then, is a potentially great movie that keeps getting in its own way, leaving it merely a good movie.
However, if there was indeed an unspoken edict to tone it down a bit, to take out the full sting, Roberts Blossom wasn’t privy to it. As the film’s Gein stand-in Ezra Cobb, Blossom is terrific — Cobb could have easily strayed into shitkicker-caricature, yet Blossom’s subtle, genial performance and piercing blue eyes serve to craft a fully rounded and fascinating character. It’s the geniality that really sticks in the craw, though; Cobb is a monster, but as portrayed here he’s a sad and pathetic beast, often sympathetic and occasionally quite funny (“I’m sorry I called you a hog, Momma.”). Blossom refuses to condescend to the character, yet he also ultimately refuses to soft-pedal his mania, so that Cobb is believable as both a likable, harmlessly eccentric old man and a Oedipally psychotic, corpse-obsessed murderer. It’s not the scenes of gutting and slashing that are the creepiest in Deranged, it’s the scenes where you start to think that maybe ol’ Ezra wasn’t such a bad guy after all. If only the whole film was playing on that level.
