Psycho: The Lost Tapes of Ed Gein

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.