Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
3
One evening, way back in 1974, an audience which went to see a film called "The Taking Of Pelham 1-2-3" were invited to stay afterward and see a special "sneak preview" of a new film. They weren't told the title or anything about the film, other than that it was rated "R". About a half hour into this special screening, all hell broke lose. People stormed out of the theater, screamed at the management, and it is even told that a lawyer present offered to sue the theater on behalf of the audience members. The film previewed that evening was "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", a cheap little horror film made by an unknown director named Tobe Hooper and financed by private investors who quite obviously did not go out on a limb financially. Like "Night Of The Living Dead", made six years previously, the film was the work of a small group of enthusiasts with an idea and limited resources.
The film is virtually plotless. It sets up a basic situation:a van full of teenagers, one of them confined to a wheelchair, travels to a small cemetary in rural (extremely, ridiculously rural. The kind of rural where you just KNOW there is going to be trouble!)Texas to check on the grave of the grandfather of two of them because they heard on the news there had been desecration of graves there. As they always do in films of this kind, the teenagers take a detour to an out of the way location and become stranded. Within the framework of these familiar elements, events take their course. Today, that course may seem a little familiar, but viewed from within the context of the time in which it was released, the film can be seen as startling, to say the least. Even today, some of the more routine elements of the movie, such as the seemingly crazy old drunk who says menacingly, "There are them around these parts that laughs at things and should know better!", are offset by scenes that are as unpleasant to watch now as they were then. One young man is bashed in the head savagely with a hammer. His convulsions are uncomfortably authentic. One girl is hung, alive and screaming horribly, on a large meathook, from which she is later wrenched, still alive, and jammed into a freezer. There is an extended and unbelievably hideous scene close to the film's conclusion in which a depraved family of cannibals, the movie's villains, taunt and torture the last survivor of the group by forcing her head over a tub and repeatedly striking at it with a hammer, attempting to slaughter her like an animal.
The film is tacky. It is grainy and washed-out looking. These elements, though, only serve to lend it a sort of uncomfortable authenticity. It has the feel of a nightmare, from which you can't wake up. Director Hooper utilizes frequent longshots, isolating his characters in arrid landscapes. It effectively conveys a sense of how alone they are. How far from help. The film has no ending. It just stops when there is no more action to play out. There is no closure, there is no explanation. As in life, events simply run their course. There is not always a conclusion. This brings the film uncomfortably close to home. The message is simple: Crazy people exist. If you catch their attention at the wrong time, under the wrong circumstances, they might hurt you. They might even kill you. Rhyme, reason or justification is under no circumstances guaranteed. To anyone. Whether or not this makes for a good movie is subjective to the individual viewer, but it certainly makes for an intense, if not neccessarily satisfying eighty or so minutes.
