Director: Tobe Hooper
Starring: Marilyn Burns, Edwin Neal, Allen Danziger
My Rating: Loved It!!!
After another viewing of the original Tobe Hooper classic, I think The Texas Chainsaw Massacre may be the perfect slasher movie. It's effective and frightening without showing hardly any gore. A note that modern day horror movies should take into consideration. Sometimes gore is awesome and fun, but a ton of movies these days overdue it and also manage to not scare even the jumpiest of teenagers. For instance, when the girl is put on leatherface's meathook, no blood or wound is shown in this scene. All that's shown is the girl being lifted up and then a shot of a bucket underneath her, no blood at all. But on recollection of the film, it seems like it's a very bloody movie; and that is the power of good film making.
I say that it may be the perfect slasher movie because it doesn't waste one minute of its lean 83 minute run time. The opening may drag a tiny bit, but once leatherface shows up, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a damn perfect chunk of cinema. It never lets up until the eerily, bewilderingly beautiful final shot of leatherface swinging his chainsaw like a madman in an adrenaline fueled moment. Jason Zinoman wrote a book entitled Shock Value and he puts it better than I ever could: "The ambiguous and oddly poetic final moments - and it's notable that the movie ends with the killer - offer the possibility of a very bizarre happy ending. His twirl in the sunset looks a little like a rock star vamping in front of a crowd. Instead of a guitar, he's swinging a chain saw, but the brutal, triumphant dance could be a celebration."
The most horrifying scene in the whole movie is the one towards the end when all of leatherface's family is having dinner with Sally tied up. It's horrifying because it almost makes the viewer feel bad for leatherface; almost. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, along with The Exorcist from the year prior, showed America that Horror could also be well made, entertaining cinema.