When you grow
up, you're supposed to put aside things that are considered childish and focus
on adult tasks. Your toys went into the
attic or were handed down to your kids.
Comic books went into the yard sale pile, and hobbies like D&D and molding
phlegm into cityscapes are to be forgotten.
Fortunately,
that was then. Nowadays we seem to
realize the importance of having something you love. It may be that we're simply a regressive
culture, more interested in entertainment than hard work, but it may also be
that we've come to realize that winding down at the end of the day doesn't have
to involve polite discussion with other adults, followed by a glass of whisky.
For me, I
wind down by watching movies good and bad then telling people about it.
For others,
winding down may involve a chainsaw and face-skinning.
On to the
review!
In 1974, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre rampaged
into theaters and freaked the hell out of people. It didn't do it through incredible
violence. It didn't have the disturbing
gore-filled scenes that CannibalHolocaust would later bring to the table.
What it did have was atmosphere.
From the very beginning, TCM
lets you know that you most definitely aren't in Kansas anymore.
The film
opens with corpses, and doesn't get much more cheerful. It turns out that bodies are being dug up
from the graveyard outside a tiny Texas town.
These bodies are then used to deface other properties, such as statues
and gravestones.
After a few
minutes of uncomfortable scenery, we're introduced to our 5 future corpses
protagonists. They're of course there to
make sure their grandfather's grave wasn't one of the disturbed ones. After a quick scene to reinforce the fact that
this is a tiny, barren, isolated area, the kids pick up a hitchhiker who is
most certainly not all there.
After
swapping slaughterhouse stories with our wheelchair-bound whiner Franklin (Paul
A. Partain), the crazy sets fire to a picture, slashes Franklin with a shaving
razor and jumps out of the van, marking it with blood on the way out.
After such a
strange encounter, rather than taking this as a sign to get the hell back to
civilization, they swing by the old abandoned family home. It's at this point that the kids are picked
off one-by-one by the greatly disturbed neighbors, including Leatherface
(Gunnar Hansen).
This is where
TCM takes that extra step to make you
feel dirty. So, so very dirty. Rather than make the mistake many
contemporary horror films are guilty of, you're fully immersed in
atmosphere. No clean, antiseptic stages
here.
When Sally
(Marilyn Burns) is tied to a chair in a creepy, hot, stinking dining room, you
can almost smell the dirt and sweat.
It's this ability to pull you into the horror of the location as well as
the situation that makes it stand apart.
Of course,
they did this the best way possible: actually trapping the actors in a hot,
sweaty, shitty space until they damn near went insane for realsies. That particular dinner scene is remarkable as
much for just how damn long it's dragged out.
It waits for you to start squirming in your chair, then continues on for
several more minutes. While the climax
technically takes place afterwards, I would say that scene is the true climactic
event of the film. While still
excellent, no other part of the movie does as good of a job at taking you deep
into the mind of true insanity.
While The Texas Chainsaw Massacre isn't
really a film series, it's been remade and re-imagined so many times that I
felt it deserved a place in the Origins write-ups. Unfortunately, no other version has managed
to hit the same notes, but they've been mostly entertaining in their own
way. If you love horror and haven't seen
it, then you're doing yourself a grave disservice.
Also, thanks
again to Juese of X-Strike for Sunday's fill-in. If you like gore and/or Japanese cinema,
check it out!
No comments:
Post a Comment