Wow, what an intense movie. I was expecting this to be scary, but I didn't think it was going to be THAT bad. I'll definitely be keeping my distance from rednecks in the future, that's for damn sure. Aside from just being scary though, Texas Chainsaw Massacre really is a good film in many ways. It's very well acted, and shot with a technical competency that makes it extremely effective at everything it does. Despite the fact that I'm too scared to leave my room right now (which is going to be a problem very soon because I've drank a lot of Dr. Pepper over the course of this evening), I really liked Texas Chainsaw Massacre and I definitely want to see it again.
This film follows a fairly conventional story. Five young adults head into the back roads of Texas to investigate a graveyard that has been reportedly robbed of corpses. On their way they encounter a strange hitchhiker who cuts himself, and then one of the guys with a straight razor, jumps out of the van and then draws a weird symbol on the vehicle in his own blood. After checking the graveyard out and finding nothing, they head to an old house which used to be the summer home of one of the kids to stay for a while and relax. But as soon as they get settled in, they run afoul of a seriously mentally ill family of cannibalistic murderers, including the maniac they encountered in the van before. One of these psychos is the killer Leatherface, who is the subject of subsequent movies in this franchise. He does all the killing, luring three of the victims into his house and butchering them with a chainsaw. The other two go searching for the others, and Leatherface kills another while our final heroine temporarily escapes, only to be captured again and tied to a chair for a strange dinner with Leatherface and his family. When they cut her free to finally kill her, she escapes, jumping onto the back of a pickup truck with Leatherface hot in pursuit.
At first I noticed a funny, but probably unintentional comparison to Scooby-Doo in this movie. A bunch of young adults driving around in a big van wearing bell-bottoms trying to solve a mystery.The mystery subplot of the graveyard turns out to be relatively unimportant to the plot however, and only really serves to get the characters out into the country to set up the story. I probably only noticed this connection because I was watching Scooby-Doo on TV the other day anyway, funny how your brain connects stuff like that. Anyways, Texas Chainsaw massacre has a running motif of animal slaughter throughout the film. The characters disgustedly smell a slaughterhouse near the beginning of the film, and talk about past and present methods of killing cows. Apparently it was formerly done by smashing the animal in the head with a sledgehammer, but now it is done more humanely by using compressed air to fire a steel rod into the animal's skull, killing them quickly and painlessly. When our protagonists pick up the insane hitchhiker at the beginning of the film, he talks about how much he prefers the old method, and that his brother and grandfather used to work in the slaughterhouse killing animals. This foreshadows events to come, because when Leatherface (later revealed to be the hitchhiker's brother) finds his first few victims, he incapacitates them by hitting them in the head with a sledgehammer, just like he used to do at the slaughterhouse. This allows Texas Chainsaw Massacre to be seen as a vegetarian or animal rights themed film. It begs the question: does killing animals make us comfortable with murder? Can repeatedly slaughtering cows or other animals make us develop a taste for human murder? Where do we draw the line, what animals are acceptable to kill and eat and which aren't? Obviously cannibalism is unethical, but this family of killers seems to see people just as other animals that they can kill and have their way with. It's really disturbing to think about.
Another great aspect of this movie is the set design, and the atmosphere it evokes. The houses are derelict and lifeless. The place that the killers live is disgusting. One particularly horrifying scene has one of the characters stumble into a room filled with symbols of death. There's furniture made of human bones, animal skulls, corpses and remains, and the floor is covered in feathers and skins. The sets have a very cluttered feeling about them, which makes them more scary because when you see them you're trying to look at everything and you don't have time to process all the objects onscreen, so sometimes when the camera cuts away you're jarred into a new shot because your mind is still processing the previous one. This made the movie scarier for me, adding a new dimension of unpredictability. In terms of acting, everyone in this film gives very convincing performances, especially the actor who plays the hitchhiker at the beginning. His character was so frighteningly realistic I had to wonder for a second if they had actually recruited a crazy person to play that role.
It's also worth noting that even though at the beginning of the film it says that this is based on true events, it actually isn't and that message is just meant to scare people into believing that this actually happened and Leatherface is still out there somewhere. Could have fooled me.
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