MONSTER: THE ED GEIN STORY 2025
Charlie Hunnam (Ed Gein), Suzanna Son (Adeline Watkins), Laurie Metcalf (Augusta Gein), Hudson Oz (Henry Gein), Tom Hollander (Alfred Hitchcock), Olivia Williams (Alma Reville), Vicky Krieps (Ilsa Koch), Joey Pollari (Anthony Perkins), Lesley Manville (Bernice Worden), Rondi Reed (Mary Hogan), Ethan Sandler (Robert Bloch), Jackie Kay (Tab Hunter), Will Brill (Tobe Hooper), Brock Power (Gunnar Hansen), Elliott Gould (Weegee), Golden Garnick (Ted Levine), Tobias Jelinek (Richard Speck), Happy Anderson (Jerry Brudos), John T. O'Brien (Ted Bundy), Darin Cooper (George Philip Gein)
The first episode of this insanely inaccurate mini-series is certainly unsettling in its atmosphere. Just the feel of it is revolting in a way that’s only ever been captured in Alan Ormsby’s DERANGED, the 1974 film that remains the best presentation on Ed Gein. Charlie Hunnam looks a lot like the real life Gein, who was an eccentric kook with peculiarities that the locals had accepted for years. The one modestly annoying thing about Hunnam's performance is the vocalization of Gein, sounding like Hugo the Abominable Snowman who wants to hug and squeeze his friend and call him George... which also happened to be the name of Gein's father.
The episode does wander away from the factual Ed Gein at times, particularly when we see Adeline Watkins for the first time at a diner. Adeline was a girlfriend of Gein's, but where this show first detours onto an off-ramp is when she gives Ed a present containing assorted photographs of Jewish corpses in concentration camps. Then there's the comic book titled 'Ilsa Koch, The Bitch of Butchenwald'; and Ilsa is depicted on the cover in the exact same pose as Dyanne Thorne was on the poster for the 1974 exploitation shocker ILSA, SHE-WOLF OF THE SS. 
Not long after, the story is told from the perspective of Ilsa and other Nazis, in what amounts to the filmmakers attempting to make a parallel between Ed's relationship with his mother and Ilsa with her daughter; such as a scene where she's showing her daughter how to shave a Jewish child's head while stating, "They are subhuman. They all bring lice". We then see other SS officers talking about how, "A Jew is a bacillus... you just exterminate them". Then a dinner scene follows where Nazis and their cohorts slovenly scarf down food as Ilsa humiliates and tortures Jewish prisoners in the same room. This feels more like an extended homage to Don Edmond's infamous movie, spending around ten minutes with the Bitch of Butchenwald, makes you forget this is supposed to be a film on the Butcher of Plainfield, Diverting into other topics is a recurring problem with THE ED GEIN STORY. Another problem is there's no evidence that Gein was influenced by Ilsa Koch, if he even knew who she was; although he was allegedly fascinated by stories of Nazi atrocites. 
What Episode 1 does get right is the relationship between Gein and his mother. These scenes are well shot; particularly the graveyard sequence that ends the episode. Gein is depicted here as having killed his brother, Henry. There was never any evidence that Gein had killed him, however it seems likely he did considering there were reports of bumps on the back of his head. Per the record, Henry Gein died from asphyxiation due to a brush fire. Henry's dislike of their mother Augusta was accurate, as was his attempts to get Ed to pull himself away from her. 
Augusta's views on women, her late husband and her two boys were accurately summed up in this exchange: "Let [Henry] run off with that whore, he's not my son. All I wanted was a girl. I prayed and prayed to the good Lord, but it wasn't His will; so I must abide by that. No matter how much it pained me to lay with your father. And I only let him defile me twice, I told you that. He stank like a farm animal. And what did that shiftless drunkard ever give me? First, an evil son who humiliates his mother and is determined to drag us all to hell and then I got you, a son so prone to all manner of weakness who seems set on breaking his mother's heart.. don't break my heart, Eddie... only a mother could love you".
If only this series stayed focused, MONSTER: THE ED GEIN STORY could've been a superlative companion feature to the major motion pictures the Wisconsin madman influenced in the 60s, 70s and 90s. However, we've got a few more episodes to go before MONSTER drives itself off a cliff--when this series becomes everything else but an Ed Gein Story.
This episode opens with Ed having a hallucination that hundreds of Jews straight from the concentration camps are attacking his farmhouse and trying to get in like something out of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968); only here, Ed’s afraid they’re going to tell what he’s been doing on the farm. So there’s lots more alternate history that Ed was influenced by the Nazis to kill. Such is a scene where he imagines himself in a brothel and interrupts Ilsa Koch talking with her husband. Encoring from episode 1, Ilsa turns up a few more times in this series' multitude of time-traveling forward or backward in history.
Then there’s the second instance of time-period jumping, this time to 1959 where Alfred Hitchcock has dinner with Robert Bloch to discuss the life of Ed Gein and his obsession with Ilsa Koch he never had. We also get a few scenes of Gein as a little boy in school. Had this series explored more about the title Monster in his childhood, his father and mother, it wouldn't need to go into these areas that have little to nothing to do with the man.
Afterward, we inexplicably jump to Hollywood where we find a dragged up Anthony Perkins with his boyfriend, fellow actor Tab Hunter, discussing how he's getting into character as Norman Bates in the upcoming film PSYCHO (1960). Tab isn't interested, becomes mildly disturbed, gets dressed and leaves the room, leaving Anthony more than a little disappointed. This is followed by Alfred Hitchcock showing off some of Gein’s revolting habits to Perkins as if it’s a sideshow attraction. Hitchcock then draws a parallel to Perkins's own secret he’s hiding (that being his homosexuality) to the secrets Gein himself kept. 
We then spend a length of the running time on Anthony Perkins and his inner struggle with being attracted to men and trying conversion therapy. What exactly this intrusive addition has to do with the subject matter is anyone’s guess. It’s another instance where the filmmakers are more interested in Tarantino-ing fact and fiction—blending both into a new cinematic world where the latter is the primary ingredient and the former is little more than a garnish. This hits the height of absurdity when we witness audience reaction to PSYCHO's famous shower scene; only here, it's visualized with graphic gore and nudity showing Ed dressed as Mother stabbing Adeline to death.
There is, however, a fantastic sequence where Ed brings Adeline home to meet mother after they've been out on a date. Everything about this dimly-lit sequence at the Gein farmhouse is horror cinema perfection. If only the entire series had harnessed this level of spook-show excellence instead of wandering off into realms of fantasy and other genre iconography.
Episode 3 opens by going back further in Gein's life, opening with Ed’s mother having an argument with his father before proclaiming to Ed that she should castrate him to stop him from having sex with those Jezebels she repeatedly tells him about. This is what this series should've been entirely about. There was plenty of material for it as opposed to this sensationalist nonsense. Some of it is cool to see, but at the same time, it destroys the mood created for the sequences that are actually taken from reality. 
The story then jumps ahead as the police visit Ed to inquire about the missing Mary Hogan, the owner of a local tavern Ed frequented in real life and a woman whom we saw Ed murder in episode 2. Ed is then seen dancing around the house in women's clothing wearing Mary Hogan's face in one of episode 3's few disturbing moments. As mentioned earlier, Hogan was one of only two people Gein was known to have killed. Her skinned face was among the ghoulish remains found within the Gein farmhouse when it was raided by authorities in 1957.
Scenes of Gein digging up corpses to steal from are well shot and add a grim ambiance you want more of. Even though his relationship with Adeline Watkins as it's depicted in MONSTER is speculative, becoming much crazier as the series progresses (the real Adeline spoke openly about her relationship with Gein after his arrest in 1957, but curiously retracted everything a few weeks later), it fits within the story more than these wild tangents the series finds itself taking. They have sex on a grave before Adeline gets Ed a job as a babysitter... yes, a babysitter. But more on that later....
One of the many other tangents THE ED GEIN STORY goes off on begins here when Adeline meets Ed at a diner and shows him a picture of Christine Jorgensen, the first person to have a sex-change operation in the 1950s. Jorgensen was a real person, but the later connections the series makes between Gein and Jorgensen are devised for this series as opposed to anything taken from Gein's life. 
What follows is the best sequence of episode 3--the “magic show”
Ed puts on for two terrified kids. This blackly humorous segment may
have been influenced by a real life incident where some local kids had
been in Gein's house and saw shrunken heads in his bedroom. When
questioned about this, Ed claimed they were souvenirs he'd gotten from a
cousin who'd been in the South Seas during WWII. Since the residents of
Plainfield thought Ed was a harmless eccentric, it was just shrugged
off. In this scene,
Ed plays hide the finger using three skull halves; the kids then have to guess
where the finger is. He then says he can turn into a woman and pull his
head off. The kids are not amused till he removes his coat, showing off
a human face he's wearing that looks exactly like something Leatherface would wear. 
Forty minutes in, the episode jumps to 1964, going back to Anthony Perkins again. He takes a male lover to see a re-release of PSYCHO paired with BURN, WITCH, BURN, before taking his boyfriend back to his home to divulge he’s seeing a woman. The excuse for veering into a Perkins/Hitchcock subplot is Perkins speaking on the popularity of his Norman Bates persona as “I’m Ed Gein for the rest of my life”. We then see Hitchcock in a meeting where studio executives want him to do a film like, of all things, THE BLOODY PIT OF HORROR (1965). It’s followed by Alfred reluctantly going to see the Italian horror flick with his wife Alma after noticing that the “bloody line is all the way around the bloody block”. 
Afterward, we’re back to Gein again, to remind us this series is supposed to be about him since his name is in the title. And since the title of the episode is “The Babysitter”, and we’re near the end, the filmmakers need to remind themselves as well. With minutes remaining, Ed has the babysitter he kidnapped tied up in her underwear; much like Ezra Cobb did in DERANGED (1974). He shrieks at her about how she took his babysitting job from him (yes, seriously), then brings in the decaying corpse of his mother and holds a sledgehammer in her bony hand to beat the helpless woman over the head. 
The scene segues into the finale of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974) where Marilyn Burns nearly suffers the same fate. We hear a director yell “cut” and we see lookalikes acting out the scene from the iconic horror movie that’s as loosely based on Ed Gein as this mini-series is. The episode concludes with the easy country croonin' tune from '77, 'If I Die, Just Let Me Go To Texas' by Ed Bruce. Things have already started to go wildly off the rails, and that continues in episode 4...
We open episode 4 with the sight of Ed preparing the body of the babysitter he executed at the end of episode 3; presumably to remove her skin. In this episode, sex becomes more prominent, playing a larger role as the series goes on. We spend more time watching the morbid, Tim Burton-style relationship between Ed and Adeline bloom despite her discovering Gein’s rotted corpse of his mother in her upstairs room. 
The previous episode depicted this, but ended it with Gein himself in the chair wearing a human mask, leaving viewers thinking he's killed or subdued Adeline. But in episode 4, she discovers a corpse in the rocking chair instead. She runs out of the house and displays hate towards Ed for what he's done. Moments later, she's attracted to his ghoulish practices of robbing corpses, defiling them and making furniture out of their parts. She says, "There's something real dark about you, Eddie Gein!" Eventually, Adeline will become something of an antagonist in the series; cold as ice, if you will.
Then later, the filmmakers radically revise history by visualizing Ed enjoying the company of Bernice Worden, the hardware store owner he eventually has sex with. She seduces him by playing on his emotions till she catches him staring at her cleavage. Ed imagines Ilsa appearing in the room to tell him Worden would make a good couch. Back at her house, Worden tells him, “If you ball me good, Eddie Gein, I’ll let you wear my panties!” She likes it so much, she suggests Ed move in with her. None of this ever happened.
Suffice to say, this episode is heavily fabricated, not just in its continuation of presenting Gein as some sort of quirky ladies man, but his sexual dalliance with Worden. She was Gein’s second and last murder victim; at least the ones Gein himself admitted to killing. She had a truly gruesome demise. The reality was that Worden was found hanging upside down in his barn for all the world to see—naked, decapitated and eviscerated. Two hunters saw the gory sight and alerted the authorities who then arrested Gein. Unlike its nighttime discovery here, Worden's mutilated body was discovered during the daytime in real life. In another instance of fantasy, Ed shows off his kill to Adeline who appears noticeably taken with this gory centerpiece in Ed's barn.
In another instance where this series loses its focus, we jump on over to Texas in 1959 for about a minute inside the Hooper household before rocketing ahead to 1968 where a grownup Tobe Hooper sees a chainsaw in a department store at Christmas time and fantasizes he kills everyone in the place for no other reason than to throw some viscera at the screen. The same goes for the scenes of Gein chasing the two hunters that find the dismembered Worden in his barn and killing them with a chainsaw. The first time we see him exit the barn with the chainsaw, he's not wearing a human mask. When the sequence picks up again, he's looking like Leatherface when he slaughters the two hunters. In real life, Ed never used a chainsaw on anyone nor did he kill the two hunters.
Much of the episode’s finale is about the making of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. Hooper shouts about how Gein was transformed into a maniac and necrophiliac by WWII atrocities, which wasn't true. The incredible Stretch Armstrong-ing of facts this episode does to connect Ed to CHAINSAW reaches its zenith here. Aside from the depiction of Bernice Worden’s dead body, a brief glimpse of Ed wearing his human skin suit, the most accurate thing in episode 4 is seeing Tobe Hooper drinking a can of Dr. Pepper.
With all of Gein’s real life murders disposed of, the remaining episodes pad his life with even more events that never happened. In between, it’s furthering the still disturbing, and now dwindling, relationship between Adeline and Ed Gein; depicting their interactions as some sort of Wisconsin version of Nebraskan killers Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. At the opener, Adeline is having sex with a guy named Randy, echoing post-coital disinterest towards Ed and a growing passion for her own manipulative ambitions. In Gein’s company, she continues her morbid attentiveness to corpses and loses any desire for Ed’s living body. She coerces him into satisfying his libidinous desires with necrophilia, something that was rumored but never proven. 
This episode is heavy on the Adeline and how devious and evil she's becoming. It also draws yet another comparison--this time between Adeline and her mother who has a similar level of disdain towards her daughter as Augusta did towards Gein. The story occasionally goes back to Gein romancing the corpse of Eleanor Adams, the head of the homemaker classes Adeline was forced to attend by her mother. What makes this especially sickening is Adeline goes with Ed to the cemetery to pick out the corpse herself. 
When the ideas run dry, this episode’s drunken script stumbles back to Ilsa Koch again. By this point, she’s arrested for turning Jews into furniture, jailed and later, having sex with an MP in her cell that acts as a fantasy of Ed’s while he enjoys intercourse with his dead lover. Adeline tries to rekindle her and Ed's wacko relationship. But Ed doesn’t love her anymore; he loves his corpse, telling Adeline “you’re too warm”. This brief moment, recalling the disgusting excess of Jorg Buttgereit’s NEKROMANTIK (1988), is a good, if disturbing, cliffhanger to end on. Curiously, none of the remaining episodes explore this further, falsified though it is. 
The Short Version: MONSTER is a massively fictionalized, ADHD account of American history’s most infamous serial killer, Ed Gein—a title he barely qualifies for. Directors Max Winkler and Ian Brennan show little interest in crafting a legitimate documentation of the madman—instead they go for as much sizzle on eight episodes of human steak as possible. There’s a greater emphasis on the pop culture and films influenced by Gein that too often takes you out of the experience. The man only actually killed two people, so expect an 8 hour catalog of carnality and carnage with as little grounding in reality as possible. Things get progressively worse and out of hand, like Rob Zombie took over the production halfway through, turning this MONSTER misfire into another redundant, TEXAS CHAINSAW shit-show. The first four episodes are occasionally frustrating, but worth delving into; the remaining four aren't worth digging into.
Episode 1: MOTHER!
Directed by Max Winkler
The first episode of this insanely inaccurate mini-series is certainly unsettling in its atmosphere. Just the feel of it is revolting in a way that’s only ever been captured in Alan Ormsby’s DERANGED, the 1974 film that remains the best presentation on Ed Gein. Charlie Hunnam looks a lot like the real life Gein, who was an eccentric kook with peculiarities that the locals had accepted for years. The one modestly annoying thing about Hunnam's performance is the vocalization of Gein, sounding like Hugo the Abominable Snowman who wants to hug and squeeze his friend and call him George... which also happened to be the name of Gein's father.
The episode does wander away from the factual Ed Gein at times, particularly when we see Adeline Watkins for the first time at a diner. Adeline was a girlfriend of Gein's, but where this show first detours onto an off-ramp is when she gives Ed a present containing assorted photographs of Jewish corpses in concentration camps. Then there's the comic book titled 'Ilsa Koch, The Bitch of Butchenwald'; and Ilsa is depicted on the cover in the exact same pose as Dyanne Thorne was on the poster for the 1974 exploitation shocker ILSA, SHE-WOLF OF THE SS. 
Not long after, the story is told from the perspective of Ilsa and other Nazis, in what amounts to the filmmakers attempting to make a parallel between Ed's relationship with his mother and Ilsa with her daughter; such as a scene where she's showing her daughter how to shave a Jewish child's head while stating, "They are subhuman. They all bring lice". We then see other SS officers talking about how, "A Jew is a bacillus... you just exterminate them". Then a dinner scene follows where Nazis and their cohorts slovenly scarf down food as Ilsa humiliates and tortures Jewish prisoners in the same room. This feels more like an extended homage to Don Edmond's infamous movie, spending around ten minutes with the Bitch of Butchenwald, makes you forget this is supposed to be a film on the Butcher of Plainfield, Diverting into other topics is a recurring problem with THE ED GEIN STORY. Another problem is there's no evidence that Gein was influenced by Ilsa Koch, if he even knew who she was; although he was allegedly fascinated by stories of Nazi atrocites.
What Episode 1 does get right is the relationship between Gein and his mother. These scenes are well shot; particularly the graveyard sequence that ends the episode. Gein is depicted here as having killed his brother, Henry. There was never any evidence that Gein had killed him, however it seems likely he did considering there were reports of bumps on the back of his head. Per the record, Henry Gein died from asphyxiation due to a brush fire. Henry's dislike of their mother Augusta was accurate, as was his attempts to get Ed to pull himself away from her.
Augusta's views on women, her late husband and her two boys were accurately summed up in this exchange: "Let [Henry] run off with that whore, he's not my son. All I wanted was a girl. I prayed and prayed to the good Lord, but it wasn't His will; so I must abide by that. No matter how much it pained me to lay with your father. And I only let him defile me twice, I told you that. He stank like a farm animal. And what did that shiftless drunkard ever give me? First, an evil son who humiliates his mother and is determined to drag us all to hell and then I got you, a son so prone to all manner of weakness who seems set on breaking his mother's heart.. don't break my heart, Eddie... only a mother could love you". 
If only this series stayed focused, MONSTER: THE ED GEIN STORY could've been a superlative companion feature to the major motion pictures the Wisconsin madman influenced in the 60s, 70s and 90s. However, we've got a few more episodes to go before MONSTER drives itself off a cliff--when this series becomes everything else but an Ed Gein Story.Running time: 53:47
Episode 2: SICK AS YOUR SECRETS
Directed by Max Winkler
This episode opens with Ed having a hallucination that hundreds of Jews straight from the concentration camps are attacking his farmhouse and trying to get in like something out of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968); only here, Ed’s afraid they’re going to tell what he’s been doing on the farm. So there’s lots more alternate history that Ed was influenced by the Nazis to kill. Such is a scene where he imagines himself in a brothel and interrupts Ilsa Koch talking with her husband. Encoring from episode 1, Ilsa turns up a few more times in this series' multitude of time-traveling forward or backward in history.
Then there’s the second instance of time-period jumping, this time to 1959 where Alfred Hitchcock has dinner with Robert Bloch to discuss the life of Ed Gein and his obsession with Ilsa Koch he never had. We also get a few scenes of Gein as a little boy in school. Had this series explored more about the title Monster in his childhood, his father and mother, it wouldn't need to go into these areas that have little to nothing to do with the man. 
Episode 2 depicts the death of Gein's first known victim, Mary Hogan. This sequence plays with the facts, insinuating she was the madam of a whorehouse. In reality, Gein reportedly killed her because she reminded him of his mother.
Afterward, we inexplicably jump to Hollywood where we find a dragged up Anthony Perkins with his boyfriend, fellow actor Tab Hunter, discussing how he's getting into character as Norman Bates in the upcoming film PSYCHO (1960). Tab isn't interested, becomes mildly disturbed, gets dressed and leaves the room, leaving Anthony more than a little disappointed. This is followed by Alfred Hitchcock showing off some of Gein’s revolting habits to Perkins as if it’s a sideshow attraction. Hitchcock then draws a parallel to Perkins's own secret he’s hiding (that being his homosexuality) to the secrets Gein himself kept. 
We then spend a length of the running time on Anthony Perkins and his inner struggle with being attracted to men and trying conversion therapy. What exactly this intrusive addition has to do with the subject matter is anyone’s guess. It’s another instance where the filmmakers are more interested in Tarantino-ing fact and fiction—blending both into a new cinematic world where the latter is the primary ingredient and the former is little more than a garnish. This hits the height of absurdity when we witness audience reaction to PSYCHO's famous shower scene; only here, it's visualized with graphic gore and nudity showing Ed dressed as Mother stabbing Adeline to death.
Tom Hollander does a fantastic job imitating Hitchcock even if the filmmakers depict him as a peeping Tom and overall creepy man. In the first episode, Ed is shown as a peeping Tom, so this is another example of the film drawing bizarre comparisons--this time between a serial killer and a famous Hollywood filmmaker.
There is, however, a fantastic sequence where Ed brings Adeline home to meet mother after they've been out on a date. Everything about this dimly-lit sequence at the Gein farmhouse is horror cinema perfection. If only the entire series had harnessed this level of spook-show excellence instead of wandering off into realms of fantasy and other genre iconography.Running time: 59:58
Episode 3: THE BABYSITTER
Directed by Max Winkler
Episode 3 opens by going back further in Gein's life, opening with Ed’s mother having an argument with his father before proclaiming to Ed that she should castrate him to stop him from having sex with those Jezebels she repeatedly tells him about. This is what this series should've been entirely about. There was plenty of material for it as opposed to this sensationalist nonsense. Some of it is cool to see, but at the same time, it destroys the mood created for the sequences that are actually taken from reality. 
The story then jumps ahead as the police visit Ed to inquire about the missing Mary Hogan, the owner of a local tavern Ed frequented in real life and a woman whom we saw Ed murder in episode 2. Ed is then seen dancing around the house in women's clothing wearing Mary Hogan's face in one of episode 3's few disturbing moments. As mentioned earlier, Hogan was one of only two people Gein was known to have killed. Her skinned face was among the ghoulish remains found within the Gein farmhouse when it was raided by authorities in 1957.
Scenes of Gein digging up corpses to steal from are well shot and add a grim ambiance you want more of. Even though his relationship with Adeline Watkins as it's depicted in MONSTER is speculative, becoming much crazier as the series progresses (the real Adeline spoke openly about her relationship with Gein after his arrest in 1957, but curiously retracted everything a few weeks later), it fits within the story more than these wild tangents the series finds itself taking. They have sex on a grave before Adeline gets Ed a job as a babysitter... yes, a babysitter. But more on that later....
One of the many other tangents THE ED GEIN STORY goes off on begins here when Adeline meets Ed at a diner and shows him a picture of Christine Jorgensen, the first person to have a sex-change operation in the 1950s. Jorgensen was a real person, but the later connections the series makes between Gein and Jorgensen are devised for this series as opposed to anything taken from Gein's life.
What follows is the best sequence of episode 3--the “magic show”
Ed puts on for two terrified kids. This blackly humorous segment may
have been influenced by a real life incident where some local kids had
been in Gein's house and saw shrunken heads in his bedroom. When
questioned about this, Ed claimed they were souvenirs he'd gotten from a
cousin who'd been in the South Seas during WWII. Since the residents of
Plainfield thought Ed was a harmless eccentric, it was just shrugged
off. In this scene,
Ed plays hide the finger using three skull halves; the kids then have to guess
where the finger is. He then says he can turn into a woman and pull his
head off. The kids are not amused till he removes his coat, showing off
a human face he's wearing that looks exactly like something Leatherface would wear. 
Forty minutes in, the episode jumps to 1964, going back to Anthony Perkins again. He takes a male lover to see a re-release of PSYCHO paired with BURN, WITCH, BURN, before taking his boyfriend back to his home to divulge he’s seeing a woman. The excuse for veering into a Perkins/Hitchcock subplot is Perkins speaking on the popularity of his Norman Bates persona as “I’m Ed Gein for the rest of my life”. We then see Hitchcock in a meeting where studio executives want him to do a film like, of all things, THE BLOODY PIT OF HORROR (1965). It’s followed by Alfred reluctantly going to see the Italian horror flick with his wife Alma after noticing that the “bloody line is all the way around the bloody block”. 
Afterward, we’re back to Gein again, to remind us this series is supposed to be about him since his name is in the title. And since the title of the episode is “The Babysitter”, and we’re near the end, the filmmakers need to remind themselves as well. With minutes remaining, Ed has the babysitter he kidnapped tied up in her underwear; much like Ezra Cobb did in DERANGED (1974). He shrieks at her about how she took his babysitting job from him (yes, seriously), then brings in the decaying corpse of his mother and holds a sledgehammer in her bony hand to beat the helpless woman over the head. 
The scene segues into the finale of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974) where Marilyn Burns nearly suffers the same fate. We hear a director yell “cut” and we see lookalikes acting out the scene from the iconic horror movie that’s as loosely based on Ed Gein as this mini-series is. The episode concludes with the easy country croonin' tune from '77, 'If I Die, Just Let Me Go To Texas' by Ed Bruce. Things have already started to go wildly off the rails, and that continues in episode 4...running time: 58:48
Episode 4: GREEN
Directed by Ian Brennan
We open episode 4 with the sight of Ed preparing the body of the babysitter he executed at the end of episode 3; presumably to remove her skin. In this episode, sex becomes more prominent, playing a larger role as the series goes on. We spend more time watching the morbid, Tim Burton-style relationship between Ed and Adeline bloom despite her discovering Gein’s rotted corpse of his mother in her upstairs room. 
The previous episode depicted this, but ended it with Gein himself in the chair wearing a human mask, leaving viewers thinking he's killed or subdued Adeline. But in episode 4, she discovers a corpse in the rocking chair instead. She runs out of the house and displays hate towards Ed for what he's done. Moments later, she's attracted to his ghoulish practices of robbing corpses, defiling them and making furniture out of their parts. She says, "There's something real dark about you, Eddie Gein!" Eventually, Adeline will become something of an antagonist in the series; cold as ice, if you will.
Then later, the filmmakers radically revise history by visualizing Ed enjoying the company of Bernice Worden, the hardware store owner he eventually has sex with. She seduces him by playing on his emotions till she catches him staring at her cleavage. Ed imagines Ilsa appearing in the room to tell him Worden would make a good couch. Back at her house, Worden tells him, “If you ball me good, Eddie Gein, I’ll let you wear my panties!” She likes it so much, she suggests Ed move in with her. None of this ever happened.
Suffice to say, this episode is heavily fabricated, not just in its continuation of presenting Gein as some sort of quirky ladies man, but his sexual dalliance with Worden. She was Gein’s second and last murder victim; at least the ones Gein himself admitted to killing. She had a truly gruesome demise. The reality was that Worden was found hanging upside down in his barn for all the world to see—naked, decapitated and eviscerated. Two hunters saw the gory sight and alerted the authorities who then arrested Gein. Unlike its nighttime discovery here, Worden's mutilated body was discovered during the daytime in real life. In another instance of fantasy, Ed shows off his kill to Adeline who appears noticeably taken with this gory centerpiece in Ed's barn. 
In another instance where this series loses its focus, we jump on over to Texas in 1959 for about a minute inside the Hooper household before rocketing ahead to 1968 where a grownup Tobe Hooper sees a chainsaw in a department store at Christmas time and fantasizes he kills everyone in the place for no other reason than to throw some viscera at the screen. The same goes for the scenes of Gein chasing the two hunters that find the dismembered Worden in his barn and killing them with a chainsaw. The first time we see him exit the barn with the chainsaw, he's not wearing a human mask. When the sequence picks up again, he's looking like Leatherface when he slaughters the two hunters. In real life, Ed never used a chainsaw on anyone nor did he kill the two hunters.
Much of the episode’s finale is about the making of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. Hooper shouts about how Gein was transformed into a maniac and necrophiliac by WWII atrocities, which wasn't true. The incredible Stretch Armstrong-ing of facts this episode does to connect Ed to CHAINSAW reaches its zenith here. Aside from the depiction of Bernice Worden’s dead body, a brief glimpse of Ed wearing his human skin suit, the most accurate thing in episode 4 is seeing Tobe Hooper drinking a can of Dr. Pepper.Running time: 57:14
Episode 5: ICE
Directed by Ian Brennan
With all of Gein’s real life murders disposed of, the remaining episodes pad his life with even more events that never happened. In between, it’s furthering the still disturbing, and now dwindling, relationship between Adeline and Ed Gein; depicting their interactions as some sort of Wisconsin version of Nebraskan killers Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. At the opener, Adeline is having sex with a guy named Randy, echoing post-coital disinterest towards Ed and a growing passion for her own manipulative ambitions. In Gein’s company, she continues her morbid attentiveness to corpses and loses any desire for Ed’s living body. She coerces him into satisfying his libidinous desires with necrophilia, something that was rumored but never proven. 
This episode is heavy on the Adeline and how devious and evil she's becoming. It also draws yet another comparison--this time between Adeline and her mother who has a similar level of disdain towards her daughter as Augusta did towards Gein. The story occasionally goes back to Gein romancing the corpse of Eleanor Adams, the head of the homemaker classes Adeline was forced to attend by her mother. What makes this especially sickening is Adeline goes with Ed to the cemetery to pick out the corpse herself.
She runs off to New York City to try and work for a famous photographer named Weegee (played by Elliott Gould), but he humiliates her. Enraged, she then nearly kills her landlord, robs her, and then heads back to Wisconsin.
When the ideas run dry, this episode’s drunken script stumbles back to Ilsa Koch again. By this point, she’s arrested for turning Jews into furniture, jailed and later, having sex with an MP in her cell that acts as a fantasy of Ed’s while he enjoys intercourse with his dead lover. Adeline tries to rekindle her and Ed's wacko relationship. But Ed doesn’t love her anymore; he loves his corpse, telling Adeline “you’re too warm”. This brief moment, recalling the disgusting excess of Jorg Buttgereit’s NEKROMANTIK (1988), is a good, if disturbing, cliffhanger to end on. Curiously, none of the remaining episodes explore this further, falsified though it is.
This episode also has a few moments that makes you wonder if Rob Zombie ghost-wrote the script--lines about pig fuckin' and shitting in people's faces. It's all downhill from here.
Running time: 47:56
Episode 6: BUXOM BIRD
At the outset of episode six, Bernice Worden is having a conversation with her son about Thanksgiving while caressing her leg while he is distracted at her actions. Worden then sits atop her son giving of a not too subtle, but not too explicit, incestuous vibe. In the next scene, her son and the sheriff find both her and the cash register missing from her hardware store. Thus begins another factually inebriated episode of MONSTER: THE ED GEIN STORY, and the beginning of this series flushing its title psycho down the toilet.
The search of Gein’s farmhouse reveals its grim contents, but this accounts for a few minutes of fact and 40 more of pulp fiction. Of all the made up nonsense in MONSTER, the one area the series doesn’t showcase as fact is the question of whether or not Ed cannibalized the corpses he dug up. This episode is ambiguous in its assertion, but considering how inaccurate so much of the series is, it’s astonishing we don’t see Ed consuming human guts by the bucketful. When authorities searched his house, they found a human heart in a pot of boiling water on the stove, so likely the legend of him being a cannibal stems from that.
When Bernice Worden was found hanging upside down in Ed's barn, they searched for her head and found it under a mattress in the house. You don't see this in the episode, but a shot of a severed head at the morgue is presumably that of Worden. In real life, Ed had intended to hang her head on the wall like a picture frame. When the police found her decapitated head, it had wire going from one ear to the other like on the back of a frame. 
The last time we saw Adeline, she was being doused in ice and cold water so Ed could have sex with her. Here, she shows up to take questions from reporters with a prepared statement lying about her involvement with Ed. This is apparently the filmmakers mangling of Adeline Watkins's statements at the time of Gein's arrest about their relationship and her later changing her story.
This episode doesn’t go anywhere and does contain a few factual moments such as the police search of Gein’s house, his arrest and his passing a polygraph test. Otherwise, Worden’s son trying to enjoy Thanksgiving while imagining Gein carving up his mother as everyone consumes the bird that acts as a metaphor for the grotesque way Gein trussed up his mother is as provocative as episode 6 gets.Running time: 45:20
Episode 7: HAM RADIO
We open in 1958 with Bernice Worden’s son suing the Gein estate to lay claim to the property. The contents of the hellish home are auctioned off, leading to the burning of the farmhouse. Meanwhile, Ed becomes the hit of the insane asylum he’s now residing in. On the outside, he’s fast becoming an infamous local celebrity. Turning Gein into some sort of sympathetic simpleton is ridiculous in the extreme, but from here to the end, THE ED GEIN STORY becomes more pointless and derisible in the remaining episodes.
The Ilsa Koch storyline that feels like it wandered in from another series, and has absolutely zero to do with Ed Gein, wraps itself up in the stupidest fashion possible. That doesn’t mean the fairy tales are over. Ed hallucinates having a conversation with Ilsa on a ham radio. He's sitting there in a bra conveying he's a big fan of hers. She returns the compliment by stating she knows who he is. 
A running theme is the matriarchal tendencies of mothers. Ilsa is included in this arc of sympathy even though she isn’t deserving of any. It’s as incongruous as so much of MONSTER’s fantasy world that’s constantly at odds with factual reality. Gein’s mother isn’t afforded any positive attributes; she’s depicted as purely vicious and evil. To contrast, Ilsa Koch, who has no business being included here, was a cold-blooded killer who had no mercy towards her victims, those being the Jews; she harbored only hatred for them. The filmmakers even find a way to wedge the legend of The Golem into this story. The real Ilsa hanged herself in her jail cell in 1967, so that's one of the few accurate things in this episode.
In episode 3, Adeline introduced Ed to photographs of Christine Jorgensen, the first man to have a sex change operation. Ed talks to her on a ham radio, much like he did with Ilsa earlier in the episode, professing his admiration for her and how he wants to be a woman. 
This is something else that never happened. A common factor in serial killers—Henry Lee Lucas being one example—is their mother’s forced them to dress as little girls; Ed Gein wasn’t one of them. Instead, he harbored a deep hatred for women due to his mother’s intense domination of his mental well being and instilling in him that women were evil and that sexual intercourse was immoral and a disease-ridden act. 
The filmmakers persist in labeling Ed as a cross-dresser when the reality is he wore woman’s skin; but not out of any desire to be a female, but out of a twisted urge to hate them as he was taught to do from the woman he both loved and loathed, his mother. This is a useless episode that offers nothing else than fantasy (such as Ed killing a nurse with a chainsaw) and using its cross-dressing device to wedge in another pop culture reference, this time with Buffalo Bill in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991).Running time: 58:07
Episode 8: THE GODFATHER
This is the last episode, thank Christ. The fallacies only increase in the series finale. The filmmakers ran out of gas several episodes back, so they cram additional psychopaths in what is a serial killer melee episode. We begin with Ted Bundy claiming two new victims before having sex with their corpses. Post opening credits, cops are interviewing an imprisoned serial killer Jerry Brudos in a sequence that plays out like a dark comedy; such as when he tells the cops he has to jerk off and doesn't mind if they watch. 
Bizarrely, Ed Gein is turned into some saintly figure with the music of chanting nuns accompanying his entrance a few times during this mercilessly awful final episode. He becomes a benefactor of the police in their pursuit of Ted Bundy, which never happened. Ironically, Bundy’s killing spree is treated more honestly than Gein’s story. 
Next up in the lunatic parade is Richard Speck. The episode alleges Speck admired Gein and sent him many letters which, according to history, was about as true as most everything else in MONSTER. And you’d swear Rob Zombie did some script revisions on this episode--having Speck delivering dialog to Gein like “Choke your chicken to these titties!” Speck killed 8 student nurses in July of 1966 in their home. A ninth potential victim evaded certain death by hiding underneath a bed. His bloodbath was dramatized in the 1983 quasi-horror, cop thriller 10 TO MIDNIGHT.
Ed Kemper and Charles Manson make brief appearances letting Ed know they're huge fans as if their weren’t other, even more deranged maniacs before Ed Gein like H.H. Holmes and Albert Fish. Manson says Rob Zombie style lines with gusto, "I killed a whole bunch of motherfuckers! You caught Ted Bundy, fucker!" Manson never killed anyone, just commanded his followers to. The whole humanizing of Gein, the nurse telling Ed he needs to set the record straight by telling his own story is hilarious in light of the rampant mendacity of this series.
It all comes to a head in the last 15 minutes when Adeline shows up at the asylum and confesses to Ed she has a list of people she intends to kill. The ultimate in stupidity is Ed watching MTV, then hallucinating he’s in the music video for Yes’s ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’,--parading around in a wheelchair as various serial killers, inmates and asylum staff celebrate him. Visited by his dead mother, she thanks him for getting the Gein name out there. 
Moments later Ed dies in bed from the stage 4 lung cancer he was diagnosed with. After his death July 26th, 1984, we see his headstone being stolen from his gravesite. For reasons not made clear, Leatherface appears and chases the robbers away who we then see as Gein doing the chainsaw dance Gunnar Hansen does at the end of TCM. Refusing to end, there’s one last scene, presumably in the afterlife, of Ed and his mother on the porch of their home; she saying to him “only a mother could love you”. 
It's curious that the filmmakers chose to go down this road to tell this story. There's no reason this couldn't have been told accurately and still be a compelling piece of dark horror drama. If you want to see a much better version of Ed Gein's twisted life, there's 1974s DERANGED and 2000s ED GEIN starring Steve Railsback (who became famous for playing Charles Manson in 1976s HELTER SKELTER) as Gein. Running time: 1:05:24
For some, this torturously overlong series may hold curiosity value if you're aren’t the least bit interested in the history of Plainfield’s resident butcher. For the rest, the first four episodes are enough. The remainder have fleeting moments in reality that rapidly dissipate, leaving nothing else other than the screenwriters bewildering spin on Gein’s life.
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