*Watch "Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein" on Amazon Prime Video here*
*Get "Ed Gein" on Amazon here*
*Get "Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield" on Amazon here*
*Get Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, The Original "Psycho" by Harold Schechter on Amazon here*
Seemingly taking a cue from Joe Berlinger's "Conversations with a Killer" Netflix shows, this limited series has a "lost" audio recording of 1950's murderer and ghoul Ed Gein, who would inspire the film makers of "Psycho" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."
The audio tape is the highlight of the almost four hour documentary. Many interviewees are hearing his voice for the very first time, and the film makers subtitle the conversation he had with law enforcement. Hearing his slow speech pattern and heavy Midwestern accent deflecting about the horrors he committed with corpses he dug up from the local Plainfield, Wisconsin cemetery is chilling. Day directs the episodes solidly, with many Gein experts chiming in as they hear the audiotape as well.
I would have to agree with other online opinions that much of this material feels padded in order to make a predestined running time. The tape must not be very long, sections are replayed again and again. There is some creepy AI generated animated footage of Gein and his hellhole of a farmhouse, and old photographs presumably of Gein and his parents. He murdered two local women and did unspeakable things with their bodies, as well as his cemetery trophies, but the town of Plainfield (understandably) would rather forget about his crimes. No one will exhume any of the cemetery plots to see if all the bodies were replaced or desecrated (there is too-brief footage of a mass grave where what they found in his home was dumped), but with today's DNA technology, answers could be sought. Gein was suspected of other killings, including his own brother, but his word was taken as gospel back when he was arrested, since no one had dealt with this type of situation before. He spent many decades in the state mental hospital, dying at the age if 77, and there is another round of lost recorded interviews done by another set of documentary film makers for an abandoned project. The sheer amount of books, documentaries, fictional films, and even merchandise on Gein is overwhelming.
I was put off by the padding of the "series," (they could have trimmed a half hour to even a full "episode" if they had wanted to), and also by the flippancy of the podcasters they decided they would interview. They try to justify the gallows humor, but I was still cringing at their asides and jokes. The victims' families either were not contacted or declined to be interviewed, but if they were going to keep showing crime scene photographs of one of my ancestors- decapitated, nude, and trussed up like a deer in Gein's attached shed- I probably wouldn't want to talk to anyone either.
Plainfield is trying to forget, but Hollywood and the rest of the country keeps this story in our national consciousness. There are some interesting dives into some horror films that Gein inspired, before these scenes also fall prey to the padding.
An edit here and there, and expanding on the gravity of the situation that Wisconsin law enforcement found themselves dealing with back in the halcyon days of the late 1950's, might have improved "Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein."
Stats:
(2023) 201 min. (6/10)
-Directed by James Buddy Day
-With Ed Gein, Harold Schechter, Dr. Jooyoung Lee, Dr. N.G. Berrill, Louis B. Schlesinger, Henry Zebrowski, Marcus Parks, Ben Kissel, Fred Reid, Dr. Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, Sonja Gould, Ethan Snowden, Chuck Parello
(TV-MA)- Very strong extreme gore, profanity, some nudity, strong sexual references, gun violence references, sexual violence references, very strong adult situations
Media Viewed: Amazon Prime Video
