Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein

There is some interesting information - but is it enough, and compelling enough to put up with the annoying older pontificating gentlemen and their monotone lazy tongue speak? Nope. I made it thru almost two episodes before I just could no longer take it. And then they intermittently throw in a couple of younger bloggers and commentors, who try to dredge up excitement for this "fantastic find ", but fall exceptionally short and then they look exactly as they are - a little too happy to be included in this pile of nonsense with no substance to add to the conversation. Not really worth watching.

Not sure if it was because the programme was designed for the US market and their constant ad breaks, or 'dumbed down' for viewers with a short attention span; but there is too much repetition from one episode to another? Also the so-called 'experts' leave a lot to be desired. The 'horror film expert's' comments about Texas Chainsaw Massacre are laughable. What are those podcast guys on it for? The producers really must have been desperate for contributors. It could easily have been covered in two episodes. More use of the original footage and the audio tapes, less of the stupid contributors. Interesting concept, but poorly executed.

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.

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.

Just finished Psych: Ed Gein's Lost Tapes, and I feel like I need a refund on my time. This four-part monstrosity could've easily been condensed into a single episode, but instead, they decided to drag it out like a toddler refusing to leave a playground. Each episode is an agonizingly slow, repetitive mess that offers absolutely no new insights or value to anyone even mildly familiar with Ed Gein.

Let's start with the crime scene photos-because, trust me, the show won't let you forget them. They ran the same three or four photos on loop so many times it felt like a bad PowerPoint presentation. I'm convinced they ran out of pictures halfway through production, panicked, and just said, "Let's show them again. They won't notice." Spoiler alert: I noticed.

Then we get to the "experts" and commentators, who are somehow even worse than the editing. They brought in three podcasters who contribute absolutely nothing. Nothing! These people just sit there cracking dumb, immature jokes over a serious topic, like they're recording an edgy middle-school podcast. It's borderline disrespectful, and every time they opened their mouths, I could feel my brain cells dying.

As for the so-called "professionals," they must've found them at the last minute because most of them were completely unqualified. Maybe three people were actually worth listening to-they knew Ed Gein personally and had some genuine insight. The rest were a mix of weirdos who seemed more like Gein fanboys than experts. Instead of explaining his psychology, they spent their screen time either fangirling or making excuses for him like they were trying to write his Tinder bio.

The audio recordings, which are supposed to be the big selling point of this whole thing, are a mixed bag. Yes, it's creepy and interesting to hear Ed Gein's voice, but the recordings are hard to hear, and I'm 90% sure they botched the closed captions. And if that wasn't bad enough, they kept replaying the same clips while mixing up the audio, so it sounded like he was answering completely different questions. It's like they were trying to gaslight the audience into thinking it was new content.

Final verdict: This show is a disaster. If you're morbidly curious about Ed Gein's voice, you can maybe justify watching it, but even then, you're better off finding the audio somewhere else. Between the repeated footage, terrible commentators, questionable "experts," and botched audio, it's a total waste of time. 3/10, and that's being generous. Go watch a YouTube video or read Wikipedia instead.