Monster: The Ed Gein Story

[Ed Gein] didn’t just kill people; he dug up corpses and turned them into arts and crafts projects. At least he was creative. So, too, is this “Monster“ installment (currently streaming on Netflix) — especially when it artfully mixes the story of Gein, played by Charlie Hunnam as the ultimate damaged mama’s boy, with the fictional monsters he inspired.

An ambitious gamble of a meta-conversation about screened real-life horrors that’s heavy on gore but very light on emotional or intellectual heft.

Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story is unsurprisingly provocative and, at times, tasteless.

Narrative chaos and thematic hypocrisies aside, Monster: The Ed Gein Story has some of the same attributes as its predecessors, though it has no single episodes as good as “The Hurt Man” or “Silenced.” It barely has episodes. It does, however, have acting in all-caps and bold-type.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story is as pulpy and sloppy as the comics that Ed reads, a product of sensationalism, rage bait, and misinformation.

It’s far too messy to serve as a compelling antidote for what came before. In the end, it’s just more — and more for the sake of more is the last thing anyone needs. “Ed Gein” seems to know as much, and yet it can’t stop itself from peddling the same sleaze it claims to hate.

Monster seizes the opportunity to indict the very audience that made it one of TV’s most popular shows. The upshot of this contempt is a season that layers hypocrisy as well as sanctimony over the grubby, tedious nihilism that made Dahmer so miserable to watch.