The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

(1974) ***1/2

As strange as this sounds, I've never seen this movie before. I started watching it once and only made it to the end of the hitchhiker scene. I honestly can't remember whether I turned it off because of some external circimstance (e.g. a parent turned out to still be awake) or if I just got creeped out.

Also, as has come up numerous times already, I don't tend toward the Mad Hillbilly genre. I think it's telling that Texas Chainsaw came out four years before Halloween but it took the dark, silent Michael Myers (and his knockoff Jason) to turn it all into a marketing phenom. Leatherface's incoherence may make him effectively silent, but he's got two very verbal relatives that fill out the bill, and while America may love slashers, we're apparently not nearly as interested in what they have to say. At least not in the beginning.

I know a number of people who can't get enough of the nutballs in, say, House of 1,000 Corpses. I've never been able to fully share that appreciation, and it's because I hate the twisted logic of bullies, even though I haven't had to deal with it since junior high. Sure, you can kill me and eat me, but do you have to be such a jerk about it? I know this puts me in a bit of a bind, since we're dealing with a genre that's meant to invoke a reaction in its audience, but I'm picky about how that's handled in cinema. You know those Seinfeld episodes that stop being funny because the level of discomfort got cranked too high? It's like that. When a movie is annoying me more than it's entertaining me, I start to drift away from it.

Getting back to the Chainsaw: all this made me not anticipate watching this one, but it was actually pretty fun. Yes, the Old Man did say those kind of things that annoy me, like "don't you worry none, missy" to the captive Sally (who naturally has a totally justfied reason for worrying). But they managed to strike that strange chord just close enough to work. When the Old Man's driving along with Sally in a big burlap sack, and he's playfully poking her with a broom, I was able to say "man, what a jerk" with a smile on my face.

In truth, I found Sally's invalid brother Franklin to be the most irritating member of this cast. The opening voice over says this was a tragedy that began as an "idyllic drive in the country," but I had trouble believing anything could be idyllic with that guy's high-pitched whining in the background.

There's a grittiness to this movie that makes it special. It's the 70's, when setting a mood was a matter of course and not handled like a bunch of pre-slashing filler. You get a feel for the heat, and for the vastness of the country. Unlike the Friday the 13th movies, The Old Man of Warning doesn't get in everybody's faces. It's too hot, so he just delivers a loose, drunk monologue from a comfy seat inside a tire. When the danger emerges, I felt bad for the kids. They had no horror movies to warn them about obvious red flags, like a bunch of abandoned cars concealed beneath a camouflage net.

Of the five kids, the first four get taken out rather quickly. So it's up to Sally to pave the way for countless busty teen girls that follow her, first getting chased screaming by a madman through the undergrowth, into the house, out of the house, through the woods again.... The scene kind of goes on and on, but it provides the final touch to Sally's nipple-revealing tight shirt and tight white bell-bottoms -- ripping! Then she continues the tradition by asking the wrong guy for help. The dinner scene -- a more specialized part of the canon -- did make me drift a bit and stop caring, but they bring it all together for the end. Sally's final scream, wide-eyed and Manson-bloody, was an effective bit of insanity.

Good stuff, and maybe not the viewing ordeal you're anticipating. Leatherface may lack the silent lethality of his more popular successors, but he makes up for it as a loud, reckless force of slaughter.