You’ve seen Psycho, you’ve seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you’ve maybe seen Deranged, you’ve seen the movies that copy those movies, and now you can see what I believe is the first movie explicitly about the real life, body parts-collecting superstar serial killer of the 1950s who inspired it all. Steve “The Stunt Man” Railsback IS Ed Gein in this exploitation movie that doesn’t really want to be an exploitation movie. This isn’t the slasher movie we might expect. There are only a few killings here and none of them are dwelled on, and the one bit of nudity—Ed fantasizing about a girl naked but for a swastika armband, as he reads a book on Nazi atrocities—is cut in such an abrupt way it looks like it ended up here by accident. The film spends a lot more time showing Ed Gein as a kind of hick Travis Bickle. He’s slow in the head, childlike, the product of a bizarrely strict religious home, and a loner so socially malformed that he’s always making everyone around him uncomfortable. Most people pity him. At least one guy thinks he might be dangerous. That guy turns out to be right. This isn’t very satisfying—those scenes of Ed’s mother appearing to him in burning bush visions were a mistake—and the filler scenes get tedious, but it does give you the chance to see use being made of that ultra-creepy quality that Steve Railsback has always had. So take that for whatever its worth.