Review – Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield

This movie: the butcher of my last damn nerve. It’s something of a distinction being the worst Gein-based movie ever made, as the field is quite crowded down at the bottom. The plot hovers somewhere between a straight Gein biopic (along the lines of the Steve Railsback version, which was a much better movie) and yet another Texas Chainsaw picture. And it ends up doing neither job well. The story departs from the facts far too radically for this to count as a “true story.” And yet it’s too boring to work as a standard slasher picture. The whole experience is typified by the decision to cast a hulking brute of a guy (think Leatherface) as the thin, wimpy killer. The result is something that will tick off connoisseurs of Geinabilia and not draw in any other audience in their place. Wish I’d skipped it