Monster: The Ed Gein Story

To say that “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” is one of the most unfocused of Ryan Murphy’s productions is quite a thing indeed. A wildly inconsistent but often ambitious TV creator, Murphy has become more and more obsessed with warping history to his dramatic will in projects like “American Crime Story” and the previous two iterations of “Monster,” smash hits for Netflix about Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez Brothers. In one sense, telling the story of someone whose crimes have already been warped through pop culture filters like the one that Murphy uses feels like the perfect match of creator and subject. After all, Ed Gein inspired Norman Bates (“Psycho”), Leatherface (“The Texas Chain Saw Massacre”), Buffalo Bill (“The Silence of the Lambs”), and many more. And none of those “versions” of Gein recreate his crimes exactly, turning them into new visions of horror. The idea of making a “Monster” about how violence ripples through pop culture, changing form as it moves, is admirably ambitious, but just out of the reach of writer Ian Brennan and director Max Winkler, who flirt with interesting themes and commentary but are really just more interested in the gross stuff. And there’s so much gross stuff.