Two siblings and three of their friends en route to visit their grandfather's grave in Texas end up falling victim to a family of cannibalistic psychopaths.
After picking up a traumatized young hitchhiker, five friends find themselves stalked and hunted by a deformed chainsaw-wielding loon and his family of equally psychopathic killers.
Director:
Marcus Nispel
Stars:
Jessica Biel,
Jonathan Tucker,
Andrew Bryniarski
A group of camp counselors are stalked and murdered by an unknown assailant while trying to reopen a summer camp which, years before, was the site of a child's drowning.
Director:
Sean S. Cunningham
Stars:
Betsy Palmer,
Adrienne King,
Jeannine Taylor
Fifteen years after murdering his sister on Halloween night 1963, Michael Myers escapes from a mental hospital and returns to the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois to kill again.
Director:
John Carpenter
Stars:
Donald Pleasence,
Jamie Lee Curtis,
Tony Moran
A ragtag group of Pennsylvanians barricade themselves in an old farmhouse to remain safe from a bloodthirsty, flesh-eating breed of monsters who are ravaging the East Coast of the United States.
Carrie White, a shy, friendless teenage girl who is sheltered by her domineering, religious mother, unleashes her telekinetic powers after being humiliated by her classmates at her senior prom.
Before being sent to serve in Vietnam, two brothers and their girlfriends take one last road trip, but when they get into an accident, a terrifying experience will take them to a secluded house of horrors, with a chainsaw-wielding killer.
En route to visit their grandfather's grave (which has apparently been ritualistically desecrated), five teenagers drive past a slaughterhouse, pick up (and quickly drop) a sinister hitch-hiker, eat some delicious home-cured meat at a roadside gas station, before ending up at the old family home... where they're plunged into a never-ending nightmare as they meet a family of cannibals who more than make up in power tools what they lack in social skills...Written by
Michael Brooke <michael@everyman.demon.co.uk>
This film has had a long and troubled "relationship" with German law. The original theatrical version in West Germany was denied a rating and therefore cut. In 1982 it was put on the index for youth-endangering media. Then in 1985 it was banned by the Munich district court and all existing copies were confiscated. Over the years the film was released on VHS and DVD in various (legal and illegal) versions, mostly cut. Since April 2008 the new German licensee, Turbine Medien, has tried to get the banning revoked and the film removed from the index. In September 2011 the district court of Frankfurt am Main finally lifted the banning (it was the first time in Germany that such an attempt was successful, making judiciary history). Finally, in December 2011 the film was removed from the BPjM index and subsequently rated "Not under 18" by the FSK. See more »
Goofs
After the hitch hiker cuts his own hand, he laughs and waves the knife. Watch carefully and you can see the hose behind the blade the blood came through. See more »
Quotes
[first lines]
Narrator:
The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths, in particular Sally Hardesty and her invalid brother, Franklin. It is all the more tragic in that they were young. But, had they lived very, very long lives, they could not have expected nor would they have wished to see as much of the mad and macabre as they were to see that day. For them an idyllic summer afternoon drive became a nightmare. The events of that day were to lead to ...
See more »
Crazy Credits
Opening credits prologue: The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths, in particular Sally Hardesty and her invalid brother, Franklin. It is all the more tragic in that they were young. But, had they lived very, very long lives, they could not have expected nor would they have wished to see as much of the mad and macabre as they were to see that day. For them an idyllic summer afternoon drive became a nightmare.
The events of that day were to lead to the discovery of one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Who knows out of what strange game of fate or as if the universe conspired upon its creation and everything that came to pass did so that Tobe Hooper would make The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Like a blood spattered, low-budget Orson Welles of 70's exploitation, the immensity of his debut will forever haunt him and his career.
The task of committing TCM to words is a difficult one, not because the proper words don't exist but merely because they can only describe the surface and never convey the essence and the heart and what can only be felt in one's own skin and maybe that of others. Sounds of animals and howling of beasts and the clanking of rustling metal speak TCM's language. The dissonant chord that sounds in the soundtrack as the movie fades from black to flashes of decaying flesh is TCM's lingo and what defines it is disorientation.
Indeed the first shot proper that opens the movie, that of a rotten head and as the camera zooms out we see the whole dead body in a grotuesque posture like some sort of zombified jester sitting atop a gravestone, offers no clue and safe grip for the viewer. After the opening credits roll, we are served an orange sun burning in a blackened sky and that dissolves into the image of a dead armadillo laying on the street. We're 5 minutes into the movie and we're provided no clues of typical genre orientation, no protagonists of any sort. As the eye scans the image for something to cling to, narrative or otherwise, there's nothing there save for decay and death.
And then TCM starts rolling and picks up steam and never stops. Apart from how original or not the concept is (crazed backwoods family terrorizing city kids) it's the approach that makes all the difference. Hooper achieves sensory terror and doom by piling on images and sounds, each of them spilling to the next frame starting an avalanche of horror. A close shot of cattles as the van drives in the background, a seedy gas station, a crazed hitch-hiker the kids pick up, an abandoned house. In the interior shots of the abandoned house the blacks are crushed and we only see silhouettes moving against the textures in the walls and those are juxtaposed with exterior shots where the whites wash out, like some kind of rural hell, a land of some other order that is coming apart under the weight of its own abandonment.
Even when the sensory chaos is broken for a while so that our genre expectations can be fulfilled as the crippled guy Franklin mutters to a couple that leaves the abandoned house to make out "Yeah, see you in an hour or so" (followed by a drone in the score) and we just know he's never gonna see them again, a typically ominous foreshadowing common in slashers, that only lasts for seconds. Then Hooper cuts back to puzzling images, feathers on the ground and some kind of dreamcatcher made of bone (?) and weird buzzing sounds in the score, like otherwordly insects flying unseen. TCM constantly tips its own axis, content to be left out of balance.
The first encounter with notorious chainsaw-wielding Leatherface is as disorienting as anything that comes before it. He appears out of nowhere like a beast in a frenzy and the carnage begins. And for a movie of TCM's reputation there is surprisingly no (or at least little) explicit gore. Yet the violence is startling and raw as the images that preceed its outburst spill into it and add their own touch of the morbid. Eisenstein must have been clairvoyant when he spoke of how powerful montage can be.
We're also given glimpses to Leatherface's tortured, crazed soul, bits of characterization like a gesture and a look of his eyes. Not a psycho killer out of sadistic pleasure perhaps, he looks more like a savage beast defending its territory or a wild dog scared of intruders trespassing in his nest.
Like an avalanche of macabre images that is impossible to stop once it starts, TCM whizzes by in a manic pace. The chase scene where Leatherface hunts down Marilyn Burns, scared out of her wits and howling like a wounded animal, is shot through branches of trees, as if the landscape is conspiring to ensnare the victim and so hunter and hunted run in the fields and inside a house and then back outside while the titular chainsaw is buzzing away in a constant reminder of gruesome death. Even when Hooper overplays his hand (as in the dinner scene) it's all done with deliberation that cannot be ignored, like maybe the director is as insane as the characters he's depicting and he takes great pleasure in basking in their insanity.
TCM simply has to be experienced, no critical analysis can do it justice. Without bucketloads of gore, without the slick look of high budget, it remains one of the most bleak, atmospheric and aurally violent movies of all time. What happened to Tobe Hooper's career after it is anyone's guess, but TCM is good enough to top entire filmographies of other directors. It has been imitated countless times, remade and given sequels and prequels to, but there's something primeval about the original that can't be recaptured.
53 of 70 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful to you?
| Report this
Who knows out of what strange game of fate or as if the universe conspired upon its creation and everything that came to pass did so that Tobe Hooper would make The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Like a blood spattered, low-budget Orson Welles of 70's exploitation, the immensity of his debut will forever haunt him and his career.
The task of committing TCM to words is a difficult one, not because the proper words don't exist but merely because they can only describe the surface and never convey the essence and the heart and what can only be felt in one's own skin and maybe that of others. Sounds of animals and howling of beasts and the clanking of rustling metal speak TCM's language. The dissonant chord that sounds in the soundtrack as the movie fades from black to flashes of decaying flesh is TCM's lingo and what defines it is disorientation.
Indeed the first shot proper that opens the movie, that of a rotten head and as the camera zooms out we see the whole dead body in a grotuesque posture like some sort of zombified jester sitting atop a gravestone, offers no clue and safe grip for the viewer. After the opening credits roll, we are served an orange sun burning in a blackened sky and that dissolves into the image of a dead armadillo laying on the street. We're 5 minutes into the movie and we're provided no clues of typical genre orientation, no protagonists of any sort. As the eye scans the image for something to cling to, narrative or otherwise, there's nothing there save for decay and death.
And then TCM starts rolling and picks up steam and never stops. Apart from how original or not the concept is (crazed backwoods family terrorizing city kids) it's the approach that makes all the difference. Hooper achieves sensory terror and doom by piling on images and sounds, each of them spilling to the next frame starting an avalanche of horror. A close shot of cattles as the van drives in the background, a seedy gas station, a crazed hitch-hiker the kids pick up, an abandoned house. In the interior shots of the abandoned house the blacks are crushed and we only see silhouettes moving against the textures in the walls and those are juxtaposed with exterior shots where the whites wash out, like some kind of rural hell, a land of some other order that is coming apart under the weight of its own abandonment.
Even when the sensory chaos is broken for a while so that our genre expectations can be fulfilled as the crippled guy Franklin mutters to a couple that leaves the abandoned house to make out "Yeah, see you in an hour or so" (followed by a drone in the score) and we just know he's never gonna see them again, a typically ominous foreshadowing common in slashers, that only lasts for seconds. Then Hooper cuts back to puzzling images, feathers on the ground and some kind of dreamcatcher made of bone (?) and weird buzzing sounds in the score, like otherwordly insects flying unseen. TCM constantly tips its own axis, content to be left out of balance.
The first encounter with notorious chainsaw-wielding Leatherface is as disorienting as anything that comes before it. He appears out of nowhere like a beast in a frenzy and the carnage begins. And for a movie of TCM's reputation there is surprisingly no (or at least little) explicit gore. Yet the violence is startling and raw as the images that preceed its outburst spill into it and add their own touch of the morbid. Eisenstein must have been clairvoyant when he spoke of how powerful montage can be.
We're also given glimpses to Leatherface's tortured, crazed soul, bits of characterization like a gesture and a look of his eyes. Not a psycho killer out of sadistic pleasure perhaps, he looks more like a savage beast defending its territory or a wild dog scared of intruders trespassing in his nest.
Like an avalanche of macabre images that is impossible to stop once it starts, TCM whizzes by in a manic pace. The chase scene where Leatherface hunts down Marilyn Burns, scared out of her wits and howling like a wounded animal, is shot through branches of trees, as if the landscape is conspiring to ensnare the victim and so hunter and hunted run in the fields and inside a house and then back outside while the titular chainsaw is buzzing away in a constant reminder of gruesome death. Even when Hooper overplays his hand (as in the dinner scene) it's all done with deliberation that cannot be ignored, like maybe the director is as insane as the characters he's depicting and he takes great pleasure in basking in their insanity.
TCM simply has to be experienced, no critical analysis can do it justice. Without bucketloads of gore, without the slick look of high budget, it remains one of the most bleak, atmospheric and aurally violent movies of all time. What happened to Tobe Hooper's career after it is anyone's guess, but TCM is good enough to top entire filmographies of other directors. It has been imitated countless times, remade and given sequels and prequels to, but there's something primeval about the original that can't be recaptured.