Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein

Like a lot of these shocking docu-series, you realize the producers do all they can to stre-e-e-e-etch 90 minutes worth of material into four hours, and it really dilutes the finished product. The premise is a bit shaky, in that we're never told why these "lost tapes" have never been heard, not even by Gein's biographers. We're just supposed to accept that they are unearthed treasures. The tapes are somewhat interesting but anticlimactic because Gein doesn't have much to say. We hear from a few experts, a few interesting people who actually knew Ed Gein, a good cross section of contributors, and three sophomoric podcasters who, I guess are there for color but seem to think the whole topic is one big joke and end up dumbing down the documentary significantly. All the while, we see the same stock footage and hear the same audio clips over and over, even within the same episode. If all that superfluous filler had been trimmed it could have been an interesting and tight project. Not bad overall, but way too long.

First off, the three podcasters in this are really, really annoying, laughing and joking around about Ed Gein's murders and laughing about the victims...

Let's just all admit that podcasting is not a genuine form of media when clowns like this are included in a documentary that has actual experts, from people in the town to the author of what's the quintessential Ed Gein biography...

Why these podcaster clowns are included is a mystery, but it's probably because the filmmakers felt that most young people can relate to young jokers, or something...

As for the titular interview tapes: they take about ten lines from Gein and try making a four-part doc with them, and that's a tall order...

With horror-movie music and a few shots making Gein look formidable, it's really the case of taking who's more a backwoods Barney Fife type than a Norman Bates or Buffalo Bill and making a contrived terrorizing study, which doesn't gel here at all...

However it's not a terrible documentary as you do learn some things about Gein... but learning/educating audiences isn't what passes for documentaries anymore...

For True Crime, books are always the best bet because there aren't any repetitive facts, opinions, speculations or photos, and best yet, no annoyingly childish podcasters.

I was really looking forward to this mini series but am kind of disappointed. Actually hearing the bits of recordings of Ed answering questions was really the only parts of this worth watching. The first episode basically goes over everything and gives very few clips of his actual voice and you can hardly hear his voice but somehow you can hear the detective clearly. The second and third episodes were just like the first but with a few more audio clips. They have chopped the tapes and you'll hear one response and then in the next episode you'll find out it was actually the response to a different question and you don't really know if the answers they put up are from that actual conversation and I do not know why they would have mixed the recordings up like that. False accusations mentioned such as a perversion with his mother and a heart on the stove. I did not care for the podcast group they had as speakers. They were unnecessarily vulgar and making jokes, laughing and being disrespectful, childish and very inappropriate in their comments. Very few speakers with actual credibility, and half of them almost seemed to have a fascination with Ed Gein himself rather than the psychology behind his behavior. I felt like this could have been one film. Very repetitive and would have been better with less random discussion by irrelevant people and more of the true consistent recordings and actual photos or video recordings. Full of peoples different interpretations of who Gein was, disappointed.

I wanted to like it and some parts were good but there's to much Speculations from bloggers and podcasters that say what they think happened without any prof that happened and it's been over 50 years so i assume that if it had merit it would be facts by now cause this is the most researched serial killer in history. It's hard to take it serious when the "experts" are 3 podcasters or someone that found about about Ed by mistake and than wrote a book. But if you can ignore that i would still recommend it because of the new tapes.and fotagedes it adds to the story that hasn't been known previously.

This could have been an interesting series listening to the tapes and revisiting some of horrors from the Geins case. Instead we have an overly produced mess with loud overly dramatic music that makes you feel like you're watching a low budget horror movie.

It seems more like an experiment to see if they could make a series with very limited new material. What we have shows that MGM thinks that dramatic music will hide how poorly researched and put together this docuseries is, repeated half truths that have been corrected over time are in here, the entire series feels lazy.

A frustrating and annoying watch.