The third entry in the Monster true-crime series is a horrible mess and a perfect example of what’s wrong with the current trend of miniseries or limited series as they’re sometimes called.
Twenty-five years ago, Steve Railsback played the real-life person in a movie that was only an hour and a half long. There’s even questions on whether Gein was an actual serial killer or not as it’s only verified that he killed two women. He’s been suspected of others but it was never able to confirm.
The series produced by Ryan Murphy is a lot of what you’ve come to expect from his shows and that’s the problem. You can only watch a geek bite the heads off chickens so many times before it loses its surprise. Charles Hunnam plays Gein but lacks what Railsback brought to the role. The real Gein was a short man at only 5-foot-7 with a slight build. Hunnam is about 6-foot tall with an athletic build. Maybe Ben Foster would’ve done a better job but he usually picks his roles better than this.
And it’s hard to find Hunnam’s performance believable. He mostly plays Gein as a soft-spoken simpleton but it’s never terrifying. However, Laurie Metcalf disappears into the role of Ed’s mother, Augusta, I wish she was used more because she just comes across as another Margaret White character without much insight to why she was why she was. It’s no doubt that Gein was probably dim-witted. He reportedly lived on a diet of pork and beans after Augusta’s death. That’s why he’s one of the few people to be found not guilty by reason of insanity.
There’s a lot to fit into an eight-episode series. That’s why the series takes numerous detours into other stories. Yes, his crimes did inspire many of the most famous horror movies (Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs). But a subplot of Alfred Hitchcock (Tom Hollander) and Anthony Perkins (Joey Pollari) working on Psycho seems like filler. So is another subplot of Tobe Hooper (Will Brill) working on TCM.
Murphy and showrunner Ian Brennan take this series so over the top that it makes Smoke on AppleTV seem better in comparison. Not every true-crime case needs a lengthy miniseries. Part of the reason the first two seasons which focused on Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez Brothers worked was there was so much to tell of their stories. I especially like the entire episode in the second season which is one long take during an interview room in a prison.
But no one watching this series will care about Ed Gein at all because he’s not as an interesting characters as Dahmer or the Menendez. Even getting to the barebones of his life, there’s not much meat to the story. This is why I feel the writers and directors took so many liberties with Gein’s life to make him more troubling than he probably was. Gein has a girlfriend, Adeline Watkins (Suzanna Son), who seems way too good for him and even becomes somewhat complicit in his crimes, even though this has never been confirmed either.
When John McNaughton made Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer based on the crimes of Henry Lee Lucas, it was easy to fudge the facts because the real Lucas and his cohort Otis Toole mostly lied about their crimes for attention and special benefits. Still despite the graphic nature of that movie, it didn’t feel as much like exploitation as it does here.
There’s a scene of Gein having sex with a corpse as well as having sex with one of his victims, Bernice Worden (Lesley Manville), even though that’s been heavily discredited. This along with scenes about Ilse Koch (Vickie Krieps), a Nazi war criminal who committed atrocities on the people at the Buchenwald Concentration Camp don’t work.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 