Crew
Director – Chad Ferrin, Screenplay – Chad Ferrin & Stephen Johnston, Producers – Michael Conroy, Chad Ferrin, Silawn Lewis & Jeff Olan, Photography – Jeff Billings, Music – Richard Band, Visual Effects/Makeup Effects – Joe Castro, Production Design – Anthony Pearce. Production Company – Crappy World Films/Dance On Productions/Laurelwood Pictures.
Cast
Brandon Kirk (Ed Kemper), Susan Priver (Clarnell Stranberg), Brinke Stevens (Salley Hallett), Robert Miano (Father Arness), Lew Temple (Ed Kemper, Jr), McKenna Ferry (Ed Kemper Aged 10), Benjamin Phillip (Ed Kamper Aged 15), Timothy Muskatell (Robert Ressler), Katie Silverman (Mary Ann Pesce), Isabella Morgan (Anita Luchessa), Erin Luo (Aiko Koo), Larry Eisenberg (Dr Vanasek), Jerry Irons (Ed Kemper, Sr), Cassandra Gava (Maude Kemper), Autumn Rose Ruch (Cindy Shall), Joe Castro (Devil)
Plot
In 1969, Ed Kemper is released from a psychiatric institution where he was placed as a child after shooting his grandparents. Against the advice of his psychiatrist, Ed goes back to stay with his mother Clarnell Stranberg in Santa Cruz. Ed gets a job with the highway cleanup department, but his mother is psychologically abusive and constantly demeaning in the way she treats him. Ed gets a car and then begins to cruise the local highways, picking up hitchhiking girls where he shoots them with a gun before photographing and having sex with their corpses.
Edmund Kemper, who received the nickname the ‘Co-Ed Killer’, was a US serial killer and necrophile. Kemper was convicted of murdering ten people, including his grandparents and his mother, beginning in 1964. Over a period of about a year between 1972-3, Kemper would pick up young students in his car and rape and kill them, often having sex with their dead bodies. His spree ended when Kemper turned himself into authorities in 1973. Kemper is still alive as of this writing, imprisoned at the California Medical Facility serving seven life sentences.
Kemper’s name rose into visibility again with the memorable performance of Cameron Britton as Kemper in tv’s Mindhunter (2017-9). (The central character that Mindhunter was based on, Robert Ressler, the inventor of serial killer profiling, is also portrayed here by Timothy Muskatell in an amusing scene right at the end). There has previously been a film about Ed Kemper with the low-budget Kemper (2008) starting Robert Sisko. The Co-Ed Killer: Mind of a Monster (2021) was an excellent Amazon documentary series about Kemper.
Minnesota-based director Chad Ferrin has maintained a modest career down the low-budget independent end of the horror market since the start of the 2000s. Ferrin first appeared with the psycho film Unspeakable (2000) and then went onto The Ghouls (2003), Easter Bunny Kill! Kill! (2006), Someone’s Knocking at the Door (2009) about demonic rapists, the Death Row horror The Chair (2016), Parasites (2016) about killer homeless people, the gonzo comedy Exorcism at 60,000 Feet (2020), the H.P. Lovecraft film H.P. Lovecraft’s The Deep Ones (2020), Night Caller (2021) with a phone psychic against a serial killer and its sequel Scalper (2023), H.P. Lovecraft’s The Old Ones (2024), Unspeakable: Beyond the Wall of Sleep (2024) and Dorothea (2025).
Chad Ferrin had previously made another True Crime film with Pig Killer (2022) – a really bad adaptation of the story of Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton – and got everything about it wrong from the look of the lead character, details of the case and even the surrounding area. I know the area and case – see the abovelisted review for my take on the film. When it came to Ferrin taking on the Ed Kemper story, one expected something on the order of directors like Michael Feifer – who made works like Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield (2007) and B.T.K. (2008), among others – or Chris Fisher – who made Nightstalker (2002) and Rampage: The Hillside Strangler Murders (2006) – in both cases, directors who have made multiple true-life serial killer films where they have ignored basic facts and made up their own stories.
However, when it comes to Ed Kemper and you watch expecting another Pig Killer, Chad Ferrin entirely surprises you. Ferrin and his co-writer Stephen Johnston have done their research. All the names and places and dates are accurate. The crime scenes conduct close replications of the victims who were killed, right down to two of the girls being Asian, while filming was conducted in the same area where Kemper lived. The backgrounds of Kemper and his mother are all littered with accurate details. Even the ending – where Kemper drove a thousand miles to Pueblo, Colorado and then called the police and turned himself in – is replicated whereas one of the films by the abovementioned Feifer and Fisher would have almost certainly substituted something more dramatic. In fact, Ed Kemper is a surprisingly good film all around. This is especially a surprise after watching how badly Pig Killer handled its subject matter. In fact, I would go so far to say that it is one of Chad Ferrin’s best films to date.
Equally, Ferrin gains a great deal of freedom from being a low-budget and independent filmmaker and is able to get away with some fairly outrageous scenes that a more mainstream film would not have been able to pull off. For one, Ferrin makes it clear exactly what it is that Kemper is doing. This starts with the fairly wild first scene where Kemper attacks Katie Silverman and tapes up her mouth. In other scenes, we see him shooting the girls and then posing corpses with severed limbs, in one scene even bringing home a torso to have sex with it in his bedroom. I was kind of wondering if Ferrin was going to give us the most notorious aspect of the Ed Kemper story where he has sex with his mother’s severed head, but this is apparently too much even for Ferrin, although we do get scenes of him yelling at her body and trying to force her tongue down the sink disposal, all of which happened.
Ferrin also creates a level of dark comedy beneath these scenes – the awkwardness of Brandon Kirk trying to explain to Katie Silverman that he has to put tape over mouth, or Erin Luo who meekly opens the car door for him after he locks his keys inside. Maybe the only point that seemed over-the-top was the appearance of makeup effects artist Joe Castro as The Devil come to taunt Kemper.
Around the internet, there seems to be some confusion about who is playing Kemper. For completely confusing reasons, the IMDB listing for the film puts the name of Lew Temple as Ed Kemper Jr. at the top of its cast list and beneath that Cassandra Gava as Maude Kemper. This has led almost everybody who has not learned how to do basic fact-checking to assume that 57-year-old Temple is the one playing Kemper. In reality, Ed Kemper the serial killer was actually Ed Kemper III and is listed third down the IMDB listing as being played by Brandon Kirk, while Temple is actually playing Kemper’s father. There is also the assumption that Gava plays Kemper’s mother but she plays his grandmother who is killed in the opening scene along with his grandfather, while the actress playing the mother Susan Priver is sixth down the list. The IMDB has since corrected this but these confusions exist in most reviews/articles that were published when the film came out who simply copy pasted the information.
The actor who actually does play Kemper is Brandon Kirk. Kirk is 6’4”, only an inch shorter than Kemper’s imposing 6’5” height. The one thing Kirk doesn’t quite seem to project is being as big as Kemper was in actuality. The Co-Ed Killer made the point of what a giant Kemper was in comparison to most of the people around him, but it is oddly one thing that Ferrin never portrays. Kirk gives us Kemper who is just a big goofy lunk but also gives Kemper an intelligence, along with some not badly written dialogue. The one who goes for broke is Susan Priver as Kemp’s mother who gives a loud, nasty and compulsively awful performance in the part.
Trailer here