By Bob Grimm

Horror producer Ryan Murphy (American Horror Story) and showrunner Ian Brennan miss the mark big-time with the third season of the Monster anthology series. Past seasons of the show, which tells the stories of real-life killers, have focused on Jeffrey Dahmer (well done) and the Menendez brothers (not so well done).

Monster: The Ed Gein Story is, easily, the worst season so far, and one of the worst things you are likely to see on TV this year. Murphy and Brennan—with a rather impressive cast list, considering the shit being doled out—get a little too cute with the life and gross legacy of Gein.

Horror buffs know that Gein—a serial killer who dug up graves and made lamp shades out of human skin—was the inspiration for Norman Bates (Psycho), Leatherface (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) and Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs). It’s fair to say that any serial or slasher killer depicted in cinema since the early ’60s has roots with Gein.

This show chooses to fantasize and even glamorize the Gein story to show his connection to these films, with re-creations of moments in those aforementioned movies, to smack us over the head with the notion that Gein is the god of horror movies. It’s a weird sort of celebration of his life.

Monster also elaborates, speculates and flat-out makes up portions of the story. Much of what happens in this show never happened, or only sort of happened. It’s basically a sick Ed Gein fantasy extravaganza.

Charlie Hunnam—looking like Channing Tatum on a cheat day with a bad haircut, and sounding like Nicolas Cage’s brother in Face/Off—plays Gein like a meek, misunderstood country boy. Living alone with his domineering mom, Augusta (a deranged Laurie Metcalf), Ed has some severe mother issues—eventually exhuming a corpse and treating it like her after she’s died. He sits it in a chair and speaks in his mom’s voice, Psycho style, one of the many embellishments in this show.

The show also depicts Gein performing necrophiliac acts, serving people-meat to neighbors, and dancing with a penis tuck à la Silence of the Lambs. In this show, Gein has a girlfriend who eggs him on to do dirty things (played by Suzanna Son), has raucous sex with one of his eventual victims, and has ham-radio conversations with an infamous Nazi.

All of this is made up; the writers explain this by recalling that Gein was a schizophrenic who made a lot of shit up, so this is what we are seeing. It’s a cheap parlor trick that just feels wrong. Most viewers will probably miss Gein’s Titanic-like death scene—moving down a dream corridor with dancing serial killers (Charles Manson drops in!) and winding up with his mom instead of Leonardo DiCaprio—because they had the good sense to quit many episodes before. I hung in through the very last, abysmal second of the eight episodes.

Besides Hunman, Metcalf and Son, the way-too-good-to-be-in-this Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) plays infamous Nazi Ilse Koch. Fire your agents, Vicky—fire them now. The estates of Anthony Perkins, Tobe Hooper and Alfred Hitchcock should all be suing the shit out of Murphy because of how their legacies are treated in this thing.

The show looks good and is well-acted in spots—but glamorizing, embellishing and empathizing with the story of Ed Gein is as misguided and vile as entertainment can get. There’s probably an interesting, semi-plausible two-hour movie here after a major editing job. As it stands, this is an overblown glorification of a really sick guy.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story is now streaming on Netflix.