Mike D'Angelo - Deranged (1974, Jeff Gillen & Alan Ormsby)
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61/100
Roberts Blossom is having a moment. Not out in the real world, of course—he died in 2011 and hadn't appeared in a movie since 1995's The Quick and the Dead. But I happen to have seen him repeatedly of late. First he turned up playing Paul Le Mat's CB-obsessed father in Citizens Band, whereupon I recognized him not as Old Man Marley from Home Alone (couldn't care less about that) but as the middle-aged mustachioed dude in Close Encounters who sits roadside holding a crudely handmade sign that reads STOP AND BE FRIENDLY.
An iconic minor character in my film-watching life. Then I happened to see Blossom again, 11 days later, as one of Clint Eastwood's fellow cons in Escape From Alcatraz. He plays the kind, gentle painter who cuts his fingers off after his art supplies are confiscated. And now I discover, by sheer coincidence (the film got randomly drawn last month), that Blossom once had a starring role in a horror movie, playing a character loosely based, as so many have been (going back to Psycho, just three years after the killer's arrest), on Ed Gein.
The moment I realized that—it becomes obvious within the first couple of minutes—a perverse wave of joy rushed through me. Because it's hard to imagine a better casting choice for Ed Gein than Roberts Blossom, even as it's impossible to imagine that anyone would actually have hired him for the role (in a movie where Gein's the protagonist). He's uncannily perfect. At the same time, though, character studies of serial killers are notoriously difficult to pull off. Psycho kinda qualifies, though only about a third of the film is from Norman's perspective. Peeping Tom, definitely, managed in large part by conflating murder with cinema itself. But even one as accomplished as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which I quite like (or "like"—I always think of my friend Matt's response when I asked him whether he liked A Clockwork Orange: "Did I like it?"), ultimately feels as if it's struggling to explain colors to someone who was born blind. Hard not to wind up either being reductive (he had mommy issues) or just giving up and depicting the killer as fundamentally incomprehensible to those of us burdened with empathy.
Deranged gives it a damn good try. The film was directed by two guys whose names were unfamiliar to me, Jeff Gillen and Alan Ormsby; both were apparently pals with Bob Clark, and while Gillen was mostly an actor (playing bit parts, mostly in Clark's films), Ormsby, I discovered only just now, wrote Clark's great Dead of Night, aka Deathdream, released the same year as Deranged. Both films depict horrific acts with a placid matter-of-factness that's arguably more disturbing (albeit much less terrifying) than the carnage in their mutual '74 alumnus from Texas. As Gein (renamed Ezra Cobb here, with Ezra frequently shortened to Ez so that it sounds like Ed), Blossom radiates Harmlessly Weird Old Coot so perfectly that it's credible not just when he lures victims to his home but also when he casually confesses to his crimes during social calls with friends, who naturally assume that he's making jokes in poor taste. And the film's most effective, chilling sequence benefits enormously from the uncommon poise of one Micki Moore, who has few other credits of note but makes none of the obvious choices for a character who awakens into a cadaver-mannequin nightmare. Such is the unusual attention to offbeat detail here that I made a note about another actor who takes a moment to hook her slippers over her heels while in conversation, suggesting that the character wasn't expecting anyone, stepped into her slippers quickly to answer the door, and then had to fully put them on after inviting Ezra in. You'd have to see how the shots in question are framed and edited but that was a choice, not something that could have happened naturally. The entire movie feels similarly lived-in.
Ultimately, Deranged still suffers from the problem common to most such movies: It has a hard time being about anything more interesting or compelling than "this dude homicidally wack." (Gein's also overly familiar at this point—not the case in '74, perhaps, but mentally projecting yourself backward to a pre-saturation mindset isn't always easy.) I'm also of two minds about the film's reporter-narrator, played by Cronenberg regular Leslie Carlson and serving more or less the same function that John Larroquette does in Texas Chain Saw, except that he appears onscreen intermittently throughout the entire movie (though absent for a long stretch toward the end). On the one hand, it's a distancing device that introduces artificiality where none otherwise exists or is particularly wanted; on the other hand, I dug the way that Gillen and/or Ormsby integrate him formally, so that Carlson sometimes steps unexpectedly into frame and starts narrating, while on other occasions the camera gets "passed" over to him by following an actor in the diegesis. (One actor directs the camera to him via her movement and then picks it up again in the same shot when she returns, walking the opposite direction.) Call that a draw, I suppose. Mainly I'm happy to discover that Blossom was handed an ideal showcase at least once during his lengthy career as a character actor specializing in Weird Old Coots. This was the weirdest.
61/100
Roberts Blossom is having a moment. Not out in the real world, of course—he died in 2011 and hadn't appeared in a movie since 1995's The Quick and the Dead. But I happen to have seen him repeatedly of late. First he turned up playing Paul Le Mat's CB-obsessed father in Citizens Band, whereupon I recognized him not as Old Man Marley from Home Alone (couldn't care less about that) but as the middle-aged mustachioed dude in Close Encounters who sits roadside holding a crudely handmade sign that reads STOP AND BE FRIENDLY.
An iconic minor character in my film-watching life. Then I happened to see Blossom again, 11 days later, as one of Clint Eastwood's fellow cons in Escape From Alcatraz. He plays the kind, gentle painter who cuts his fingers off after his art supplies are confiscated. And now I discover, by sheer coincidence (the film got randomly drawn last month), that Blossom once had a starring role in a horror movie, playing a character loosely based, as so many have been (going back to Psycho, just three years after the killer's arrest), on Ed Gein.
The moment I realized that—it becomes obvious within the first couple of minutes—a perverse wave of joy rushed through me. Because it's hard to imagine a better casting choice for Ed Gein than Roberts Blossom, even as it's impossible to imagine that anyone would actually have hired him for the role (in a movie where Gein's the protagonist). He's uncannily perfect. At the same time, though, character studies of serial killers are notoriously difficult to pull off. Psycho kinda qualifies, though only about a third of the film is from Norman's perspective. Peeping Tom, definitely, managed in large part by conflating murder with cinema itself. But even one as accomplished as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which I quite like (or "like"—I always think of my friend Matt's response when I asked him whether he liked A Clockwork Orange: "Did I like it?"), ultimately feels as if it's struggling to explain colors to someone who was born blind. Hard not to wind up either being reductive (he had mommy issues) or just giving up and depicting the killer as fundamentally incomprehensible to those of us burdened with empathy.
Deranged gives it a damn good try. The film was directed by two guys whose names were unfamiliar to me, Jeff Gillen and Alan Ormsby; both were apparently pals with Bob Clark, and while Gillen was mostly an actor (playing bit parts, mostly in Clark's films), Ormsby, I discovered only just now, wrote Clark's great Dead of Night, aka Deathdream, released the same year as Deranged. Both films depict horrific acts with a placid matter-of-factness that's arguably more disturbing (albeit much less terrifying) than the carnage in their mutual '74 alumnus from Texas. As Gein (renamed Ezra Cobb here, with Ezra frequently shortened to Ez so that it sounds like Ed), Blossom radiates Harmlessly Weird Old Coot so perfectly that it's credible not just when he lures victims to his home but also when he casually confesses to his crimes during social calls with friends, who naturally assume that he's making jokes in poor taste. And the film's most effective, chilling sequence benefits enormously from the uncommon poise of one Micki Moore, who has few other credits of note but makes none of the obvious choices for a character who awakens into a cadaver-mannequin nightmare. Such is the unusual attention to offbeat detail here that I made a note about another actor who takes a moment to hook her slippers over her heels while in conversation, suggesting that the character wasn't expecting anyone, stepped into her slippers quickly to answer the door, and then had to fully put them on after inviting Ezra in. You'd have to see how the shots in question are framed and edited but that was a choice, not something that could have happened naturally. The entire movie feels similarly lived-in.
Ultimately, Deranged still suffers from the problem common to most such movies: It has a hard time being about anything more interesting or compelling than "this dude homicidally wack." (Gein's also overly familiar at this point—not the case in '74, perhaps, but mentally projecting yourself backward to a pre-saturation mindset isn't always easy.) I'm also of two minds about the film's reporter-narrator, played by Cronenberg regular Leslie Carlson and serving more or less the same function that John Larroquette does in Texas Chain Saw, except that he appears onscreen intermittently throughout the entire movie (though absent for a long stretch toward the end). On the one hand, it's a distancing device that introduces artificiality where none otherwise exists or is particularly wanted; on the other hand, I dug the way that Gillen and/or Ormsby integrate him formally, so that Carlson sometimes steps unexpectedly into frame and starts narrating, while on other occasions the camera gets "passed" over to him by following an actor in the diegesis. (One actor directs the camera to him via her movement and then picks it up again in the same shot when she returns, walking the opposite direction.) Call that a draw, I suppose. Mainly I'm happy to discover that Blossom was handed an ideal showcase at least once during his lengthy career as a character actor specializing in Weird Old Coots. This was the weirdest.
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