THREE ON A
MEATHOOK (1973) Directed by William Girdler Late exploitation auteur
William Girdler (Grizzly, Day of the Animals) plun- dered the Ed Gein mythos for his second film, which tantalizes with that title. In it, Billy Townsend (James
Pickett) lives on a farm with his widower father (Charles Kissinger) and has no memory of mur- dering the young women his Pa keeps finding around the place. But Billy sure enjoys the special meat that his old man butchers in his locked shed! Girdler switched genders for the domineering
parent and roles for the killer, but kept the canni- balism Gein was (only) rumoured to have indulged in, and really honed in on the idea of hanging peo- ple on meathooks, which would become such an iconic image in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre a year later. Unfortunately, the title is the best part of this interminably dull film. gm
NECROPHILE (1974) Directed by Jeff Gillen and Alan Ormsby Released the same
DERANGED: CONFESSIONS OF A
year as the original Texas Chainsaw Mas- sacre, this Canuck flick is more faithful to Gein’s persona, life and
crimes than Tobe Hooper’s movie (despite an an- noying recurring reporter character who appears to address the audience). Gangly character actor Roberts Blossom plays Gein stand-in Ezra Cobb; soft-spoken, nervous and terminally creepy, he’s haunted by his dead, domineering mother, whom he digs up, moves back into the house and tends to. As Gein did, Ezra robs enough graves to deco- rate his place with trinkets crafted from body parts (one particularly disturbing scene, which was cut from the theatrical release but can be seen in some reissues, shows Ezra graphically scooping the brains and eyes out of a victim’s head), and he’s taken a fancy to wearing human skin. As his ghoulish impulses escalate, we’re treated to a very TCM-like stalking scene in the house with a Mary Hogan stand-in, which leads to Ezra’s last kill: a hardware store employee meant to be the younger version of Gein’s last vic- tim, hardware store owner Bernice Worden. Deranged definitely doesn’t shoot for a true
representation of Ed Gein – despite the film’s title, our amateur taxidermist was not a necrophile – but this grainy grindhouse pleaser has a lot going for it: graphic effects by Tom Savini, Black Christ- mas director Bob Clark on as producer (credited as Tom Karr), a script by Alan Ormsby of Death Dream fame, and a very well-cast lead.dn
Your Mother’s Calling: (from top) Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) was the first cinematic embodiment of Gein in Psycho, and Ezra Cobb (Roberts Blossom) as a more morbid incarnation of the killer in Deranged.
THE TEXAS CHAIN- SAW MASSACRE
nagian proportions in the clan’s abandoned amuse- ment park lair. New Line Cinema attempted to franchise TCM
(1974 – 2013) Directed by Tobe Hooper, Jeff Burr, Kim Henkel, Marcus Nispel, Jonathan Liebesman and John Luessenhop When Kim Henkel and Tobe Hopper scripted The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), they took the most gruesome elements of Gein’s crimes – grave- robbing, corpses as decoration, skin masks, sus- pected cannibalism – and spread them across the twisted family’s three brothers. The Cook (Jim Siedow) is amiable yet creepy and may be selling human meat as BBQ. The Hitchhiker (Ed Neal) is creepier, wears a bag fashioned from a cat head, and is obsessed with death. Leatherface is an impene- trable introvert who wears masks made of human skin and kills out of fear. Hooper made The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
(1986) decidedly more comic. He gave the family a surname, Sawyer, made the Cook, now named Drayton, an award-winning chili chef, let Leather- face explore his sexuality and introduced new brother, Chop Top (Bill Moseley), as the twin of the Hitchhiker (now a mummified corpse). Gein’s macabre decorating sense is taken to brobding-
with Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part III (1990). Leatherface, the only carry over from Hooper’s films, now lives with a new family of can- nibals. Director Jeff Burr delivered a full-on splatter film that was heavily cut for an R rating, and even banned in some markets. A nod to Gein sees a victim strung up in the kitchen like a deer. Henkel essentially remade TCM as The Return of
the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1994), but threw in a government conspiracy and turned Leatherface into a cross-dresser. The cast features an early ca- reer Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger, and a lipstick-applying Leatherface whom many compared to The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffallo Bill – more in line with Gein psychologically, but the film itself is nevertheless awful. Another remake arrived in 2003, featuring
Leatherface as the central villain. Here he’s horribly disfigured beneath his mask – thereby making him more boogeyman than tortured soul with an identity crisis. This was even more so the case with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006), as he’s now a deformed and horribly abused bastard child of a slaughterhouse worker (left in a slaugh- terhouse dumpster to die as a baby) who lives with yet another cannibalistic clan. This is over-the-top Hollywood monster
making.gm
25RM
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