Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield

Ever since he played a goon in Lone Wolf McQuade, actor/stuntman Kane Hodder has been busy. His film, Hatchet, got all the publicity last year, but he still makes a couple of more films every year. He should have skipped this one.

Hodder seems to be the king of the slashers. he has played Jason Voorhees from 1988's Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988) to Jason X (2001). He is working on a new film that appears to be a Halloween remake. He is very much what I would call the serial killer type with his methodical, expressionless thirst for blood.

However, there wasn't much blood in this movie and very little action occurred on camera. It felt as if I was watching an episode of real law enforcement on A&E.

I won't put the blame entirely on Hodder's shoulders, as the rest of the actors didn't contribute much either.

Michael Berryman (The Hills Have Eyes, The Devil's Rejects) just ran his mouth until Gein shut him up. Adrienne Frantz ("The Bold and the Beautiful") was cute. Veteran actress ("Three's Company") and Penthouse Pet, Priscilla Barnes did a credible job. I am sure there are other horror favorites, but they all just seemed to run through their roles.

I have watched this movie quite bemused. I am not sure whether it was attempting to be a horror gore fest in a Rob Zombie type affair or an exploration of real events.

In either case it missed its mark. It's not particularly historically accurate with characters being chopped and changed for the sake of the story.

The performances were neither compelling nor bad.

For me, I would have preferred a more psychological approach and this film could easily have gone down this route without spoiling the overall effect.

***May contain spoilers***

I had very high expectations for this film, based on the trailer. I knew a bit about the real Ed Gein, so I figured this was a medium-budget Hollywood version of the real events. Man was I wrong.

First, the writing apparently came from an eight-grader who barely knew anything about Ed's history and cranked out the script in about 20 minutes. The movie completely passes over the most interesting facets of Ed and his relationship with his mother (not to mention what the real police found in his house) and decides to focus primarily on the young deputy who looks like he just wandered onto the set. Likewise, all of the male characters seem to be ad-libbing their dialog throughout the entire movie. I'm not exaggerating.

Don't even get me started with the historical goofs in this movie. Seriously, who the hell directed this? This movie is supposed to take place around 1957, but the cops are carrying modern side-handled batons, some of the stuff in the hardware store look like they came from Lowes, and when the cop gets to a payphone he dials 9-1-1 (didn't exist back then). Also, Ed was a small guy, scary like Anthony Perkins' character in Psycho (who was supposedly based on real-life Ed), not this burly dude who ended up looking way too much like the bad guy in Men In Black.

Another thing that really bugged me was the appearance that the makers of this film shot the whole thing in an abandoned, 3 building set. Because of the "clever" camera angles, you never see any actual town, and the interior of the sets looked like old, long-abandoned shacks. Pop a cash register on a saw-horse and bam!--instant hardware store.

I'm usually pretty forgiving of low-budget horror films, but this one just begs for it. All you had to do was include most of the real events (even embellish them!), pay five good actors instead of 15 crappy ones, and for Pete's sake take 5 minutes and think about the time period once in a while. My advice: Google Ed Gein, you'll be far more entertained.

I agree with the first reviewer. The real Ed Gein was nothing like the one depicted in this movie. In the first place, the real Ed Gein was NOT aggressive. He was a shy, quiet man. The guy in this movie got mad real easy and when he got mad, he LUNGED at people. There was a scene where he went to the graveyard to dig up a body and the night watchman was there. All it took was a couple of lines and Ed got mad and killed him. That did NOT happen in real life. There are a lot of serial killer movies being made these days and quite frankly, NONE of them are accurate. Either the makers of the movie are lazy and don't research the real story enough, or they are calling themselves "spicing up" the movie for interest purposes. Whatever the reason, they just kill the story by adding a bunch of made up stuff. I think the worst one i've seen to date was the BTK Killer by Uli Lommel. Man talk about a waste of celluloid. That movie was so bad i will deliberately AVOID any Uli Lommel movies in the future.

Did we really need another movie-version of the life and crimes of Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein? No, of course we didn't, but clever producers realize there's always room for one more, especially because all horror movie fans agree that Ed Gein simply is one of the most – perhaps THE most – fascinating sick individuals in history. And the producers of this movie were even extra clever, as they managed to cast no less than Kane Hodder in the titular role. Hodder is already a bit of a horror legend on himself (depicting Jason Vorhees multiple times in the "Friday the 13th series") and his name alone is guaranteed to attract even more viewers. I've lost count of how many movies – both fictional and non fictional – there already are closely inspired or loosely inspired by Ed Gein. There are the strictly factual and almost biographical ones, like "In the Light of the Moon" and "Deranged: Confessions of a Serial Necrophile", but of course the most commonly known horror classics simply used little morbid characteristics of Gein's utterly demented persona, like "Psycho", "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", "Motel Hell", "House of 1.000 Corpses" and "The Silence of the Lambs". As you can probably derive from its juicy title as well as from the DVD cover art, this particular isn't too concerned with accuracy and merely just sets out to shock and provoke its viewers with a whole lot of gruesome images and perverted insinuations. It feels as if director Michael Feifer wants to make us believe his film version is truthful, but repeatedly "forgets" about the facts in favor of sheer horror movie excitement. Kane Hodder portrays Ed Gein like he was a muscularly shaped and relentlessly unstoppable killing machine, whereas in reality he was a scrawny and miserably timid guy whose horrendous psychopathic tendencies only gradually come to the surface after his arrest. Although Gein only ever got charged with two murders he commits nearly a dozen of vile kills here, so you know you don't have to check out this film for its informative value. Still I don't want to bash this straight-to-video production entirely, because there really are a handful of positive things to say as well. The make-up effects are effectively nauseating and the Californian filming locations were aptly chosen in order to recreate the depressing 50's Wisconsin atmosphere. And in spite of his unfit posture, Kane Hodder isn't such a bad choice to depict Ed Gein. He hardly has lines to speak but looks menacing throughout the entire playtime.