From my favorite movies..

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Oh Dear! Anyone who knows the story of Ed Gein will hate this. It bears hardly any relationship to the Gein murders other than his name. As a run-of-the-mill,low-budget murder\thriller,this Is barely watchable. As the "Ed Gein story", It's laughable. To say It was very loosely based on the Gein case would be pushing It somewhat! Now, the movie Itself. Poor acting - 'Gein' and the Sheriff In particular could do with a few lessons - as for special effects, well there's a brief look at several dummy heads falling out of a bag and not much else! The Sheriffs daughter has a smashed knee that looks quite realistic, until of course the agony seems to subside as she sits on the ground and pulls her knees right up to her chin...not so much as a grimace...It's a miracle! Don't bother watching unless It's to compare to the superb and accurate "Ed Gein"(2000)".

Old Ed was active back in the late 1950's He was apprehended 16 November 1957. The PR-24 Police Baton was invented in 1974. Yet the cops in the movie are all carrying the PR 24. Back then it would have been a standard "billy club" not the side handled PR 24. Sheeze, if you are gonna make movies do your research and get it right. Also it makes no mention of Ed's usage of the bodies. He tanned most of the skins and made various articles including a lampshade, a belt and several masks. He also had a large selection of "shrunken heads" that several local children knew about as he often babysat for them. He was found incompetent and committed to the Central State Hospital for the criminally insane.

The title tells it all -- Ed Gein, the butcher of Plainfield.It's not a zappy action-filled slasher movie made for teens high on energy drinks. That would fit it into a well-established genre, the kind that some people find entertaining, something along the lines of "Halloween" or "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre".This is dark, slow, filled with chopped-up corpses, and quietly evil. There are few shock cuts, no monster's point-of-view shots, no loud electronic score. I don't know who it's aimed at -- ghouls, maybe.Beneath the credits we already see still photos of skulls, carcasses hung up, skins draped across the backs of chairs, that sort of thing. And they're sufficiently revolting that I couldn't help thinking this movie had better be pretty good to make up for this Grand Guignol opening.Alas, it's not. The acting is uniformly terrible, as in a high school play. The script does its best to sink below vulgarity. Ed Gein, who killed only two middle-aged women and maybe his brother, chases a screaming, bloody young woman through the Woodland of Weir, and she's wearing only a modern bra and bikini, rather than period underwear. Gein also decapitates a night watchman, which he never did in any historical sense.The direction? You could do a better job. In the first few minutes, law officers discover an abandoned car with blood spattered all over the windshield. There is no body. The handsome young deputy sheriff turns to his boss and suggests they search for the victim, who may still be in the vicinity and living. The sheriff, lacking any motivation, shouts at him, "Now you just FORGET that! I don't want you going off HALF COCKED on anything!" It should be no more than a business-like exchange of views. Why does the director have the sheriff so angry? Characters of diverse sorts listen to radio programs or records that play old jazzy pop songs -- Louis Armstrong's "Ain't Misbehaving," for instance. This is -- what -- rural WISCONSIN in the 1950s? And the characters insist on music that would appeal to customers of the Cotton Club in Harlem in the 30s, or New York intellectuals like Woody Allen. Nope. The radio would be playing Kitty Kallen's "Wheel of Fortune" or Theresa Brewer or, equally likely, Lefty Frizell. Not that the dysfunction between the music and the events adds anything to our understanding of what's going on beneath the images. Someone involved in the production just liked old jazzy pop songs, that's all.Of course there's only so much you can do with a low budget, but it can be light years ahead of this butchery. See "Ed Gein," with Steven Railsback for an example of a much more sophisticated way of dealing with this lunatic and his penchant for dead bodies, and on a budget that couldn't have exceeded this one by much.These comments are all based on the first twenty minutes of the movie. That's about as far as I could get. If anyone finds this tale to be well-executed and fascinating in any way, he should try to find some insight into his tastes. It's beneath mine -- and I consider myself pretty warped.

I own a vacation lake home not far from Plainfield, WI. Ten minutes from the Gein property to be exact. I've seen his land, the cemetery where he is buried and where he did his digging, and I've shopped at the hardware store that was formerly owned by the Worden family. While visiting relatives in California, we decided to rent this movie. It was disgusting. The true story of Ed Gein is so disturbing and creepy, why the creators of this piece of trash decided to make up their own story is beyond me. The actor playing Ed is a very large man, Ed was a very small, meek, and shy man. That is part of what makes his story so frightening. He did not have a helper to dig up the graves and anyone who owns land in the area knows that it is mostly sand with a little dirt in it. You won't break much of a sweat digging a hole. They didn't have to hire an actor with the physique of a wrestler, just do your research. And if the writing wasn't bad enough - there are NO mountains in Wisconsin, and I'm pretty certain that 911 was not available in 1957.