| | | Before Dahmer, before Gacy, there was Ed.
Features: DVD
The time was the late '50s. The place was Plainfield, Wisconsin. Not much ever happened in this quiet town of 642 people... Until the population dropped to 641. Ed Gein (Steve Railsback) is a simple man who wants to lead a simple life on his family's farm. But the farm is remote, the family is gone, the crops perished long ago. And the ghosts of Ed's past are coming back to haunt him. Ed's only companion in life was his domineering mother Augusta (Carrie Snodgress), and she loved Ed to a fault. She did her best to raise him as an upstanding Christian, with daily Bible readings and the occasional lash of her belt. But dear Augusta died a few years back...and Ed will never be the same. Because Ed always did have peculiar interests. Reincarnation. Head-shrinking. Cannibalism. And the wonderful world of female anatomy. Soon, Ed is doing something about it. The freshly buried bodies of Plainfield's dead women are starting to disappear. Ed spends his evenings in the local cemetery, then burns the midnight oil back at the farm. Folks in Plainfield may think Ed is a bit simple-minded, but he's actually very creative. With the help of Gray's Anatomy, Ed is making his own housewares: a lampshade here, a soup bowl there. He's especially proud of the skin suit he wears on special occasions. Now, though, Augusta's ghost is getting louder. She doesn't like the look of that oversexed barmaid Mary Hogan (Sally Champlin). That snooty storeowner Colette Marshall (Carol Mansell) will also have to go. And Ed is just getting started. "I will show unto thee the judgment of the great whore," commands Augusta--and who is Ed to argue? After all, he loves his work. This is the story that inspired Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs--but the truth is even more terrifying. You've never met anyone like Ed. You've never seen a film like Ed Gein.
"Steve Railsback...is most convincing." Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times
Editor's Note
Ed Gein, a shy and retiring 1950s Wisconsin farmer, shocked the nation in 1957 when he was discovered to be a deeply deranged serial killer. Gein, a serial killer of nightmarish proportions, became the inspiration for Robert Bloch's novel PSYCHO, adapted for Hitchcock's legendary film, as well as the films THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. ED GEIN recreates the early years of the reclusive man (Steve Railsback) who was raised in relative seclusion by an abusive father and an extremely domineering and puritanical mother (Carrie Snodgress.) As Ed grew to adulthood in the small farming community of Plainfield, Wisconsin he developed an unnatural obsession with his mother and her ultimate approval. After her death, Ed was possessed by her spirit, psychologically unable to give up his lifelong adoration of his deeply devout, brutal, and deranged companion. Driven insane by his own obsessions, Ed became an amateur grave robber in Plainfield and eventually became a solitary practioner of grotesque anatomy experiments and cannibalism. His fetishistic infatuation with the female body and bloodthirsty repressed lust eventually led him to murder the first of his victims, a seductive bartender (Sally Champlin), who Ed believed his mother would disapprove of. Eventually, in 1957, as Ed became more and more consumed by murder, he killed again and was eventually caught at his home--a gruesome and deeply horrific shrine to his bizarre rituals, cannibalism, and necrophilia. This dark and brutally violent film sheds new light on the strange and terrifying man whose deeply disturbing life has haunted the nation's subconscious for decades.
| Features | Scene Access | | Audio: English Dolby Digital Stereo | | Trailer | | Subtitles: Spanish | | Interactive Menus |
| Technical Info
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Release Information
| | Studio: First Look Pictures |
| Release Date: 4/22/2003 |
| Running Time: 88 minutes |
| Original Release Date: 2001 | | Catalog ID: 8464-7 | | UPC: 00687797846426 | | Number of Discs: 1 |
Audio & Video
| | Original Language: English | | Available Audio Tracks: English | | Video: Color |
Aspect Ratio | | 4:3 |
| Cast & Crew
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| | Professional Reviews | Sight and Sound
"...[Parello is] an honourable devotee of a higher tradition of horror, eschewing shocks and gore for a degree of intellectual distance and placid remove..." 08/01/2001 p.42Uncut
"It reminds us that, outside of Hollywood, serial killers are no laughing matter." 08/01/2004 p.135 |
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