My father likes to relate how, many years ago, my mom’s only brother swore at the family Sunday dinner gathering that the greatest movie ever made was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, something he would later utterly deny ever saying.
The actual movie came out a month or so before I came into the world, and I figure my uncle would have been somewhere between 15-17 when he saw it. And, quite frankly, minus a gratuitous sex scene, on the surface The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is exactly the sort of movie a teenage boy would call the greatest of all time. The Godfather it is not.
Of course, that doesn’t mean The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a bad movie. We should maybe judge it by far different metrics than the exploitative-sounding title would suggest.
The movie opens with narration from the actor who probably went on to the most fame out of the entire cast, as future TV actor John Larroquette gives us a good idea of what is to come, how young Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) survived something no young person, or indeed any person, should have to live through while on a roadtrip with her physically disabled brother Franklin (Paul A. Partain) and three friends through rural Texas. We then cut to a cemetery where someone has been doing things to the corpses, and finally to the van where the five youngsters are riding along. Franklin says quite a bit about a relative who used to work in a slaughterhouse and how the process works, prompting one of the two women in the van (possibly Sally, but I’m not sure which one) to more or less state the movie’s thesis about the barbarism of eating meat. Director Tobe Hooper has confirmed that, even noting he became a vegetarian while making the movie.
The group stops to pick up a hitchhiker who seems a little too enthused about the act of killing livestock, and after he cuts himself and Franklin, the group drops him and drives off. Out of gas and unable to get any until the next day, the five stop at the long-abandoned house the Hardesties used to call home. But then, by ones and twos, they wander off in the direction of the nearest, even more abandoned-looking house and meet up with the cannibal family who lives there, most notably the mute, chainsaw-welding brother Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen).
So, what to make of a movie like this? Is it scary? While it can create a good deal of atmosphere, I’m not sure if “scary” is the right word to use. “Intense” might be a better one. Once Leatherface lurches onto the screen, there’s no let-up until the closing credits run. Finding safety somewhere else isn’t really an option, and the bad guys don’t come out exclusively at night. When Last Girl Sally is tied up for dinner, a dinner she might soon be becoming part of, we get close-ups of Burns’s wild, wide-open green eyes, her spoken dialogue devolves into nothing but minutes worth of inarticulate screams, and the various members of the Sawyer family just laugh and shout at each other, save Leatherface since he’s a mute. Sally, in various escape attempts, jumps through two different windows to flee, and only through what looks like dumb luck manages to survive as the opening narration promises. Furthermore, the Sawyer house is not only dirty and decrepit, but filled with souvenirs from various kills, some human, some not. Furniture is made of human bone, and a human face seems to be stretched over a lamp to create something like a lampshade.
Plus, this is another one of those movies where the low budget actually helps. The bodies and the make-up on ancient Grandpa Sawyer may not be the most realistic, but it does give everything a seedy look that helps with the setting.
On the other hand, that dinner sequence got a bit long for my tastes after a while, and as I said above, I don’t remember which of the two young women in the van expressed a preference for vegetarianism, but the reason for that is, beyond maybe Franklin, none of the five young people in the van have particularly distinctive personalities. That may or may not be deliberate, but it makes it a little harder to care what happens to any of them if they don’t have anything like distinctiveness to set them apart from each other aside from the most basic of ways, i.e. one drives the van.
But really, does anyone go into something with a title like this one expecting anything deep? Probably not. Hooper demonstrates a lot of skill for an untried director, and Leatherface does make a rather distinctive impression. The movie’s last shot, showing Leatherface swirling his chainsaw around his head in rage and frustration, doesn’t suggest anything like the Sawyer family’s defeat even if it is down a member or two, but just that they’re still out there and still hungry.
Then again, a movie like this, while not as gory or violent as its reputation might suggest, probably isn’t for me. I didn’t find myself cowering from it. I just wondered in places when they were going to get on with it and actually do something.
Grade: C+
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