This is one of those movies that I knew was a horror classic, but my knowledge of the movie pretty much ended there. But, of course, I kind of assumed that it would involve chainsaws and lots of killing.
I was actually quite surprised when I finally sat down to watch it and realized that wasn't at all the case. I mean, there was a chainsaw involved, but it didn't play as big a role as I expected.
The movie takes a little while to really get going, but the mystery and mystique established with the opening text crawl is very well done (even if the fact that it's a true story is a bold faced lie) and kept my attention and interest. When it's finally established that the 5 teens are venturing to a small town in Texas to visit a homestead of the brother/sister, the viewer kind of assumes it's gonna get ugly fast, but it really doesn't. The first 30 minutes are filled with pretty bad acting inside a van, where you quickly began to get tired and annoyed by the invalid, wheelchair bound brother Franklin, at least I did. He's a whiny piece of work, that Franklin. *pbbbbt*
As far as the execution (no pun intended) of the film, it was much more tame than I expected in the kill scenes of the 4 teens that bite the dust in the film. I guess this was probably due to the filmmakers wanted it to get shown in theaters. The beauty of the film though, and I guess one of the reasons it is such a classic is that it doesn't need to have gory kill scenes. It's documentary style and suspenseful music and film editing give it all the terror that it needs.
One thing about this movie that really stood out to me was the art direction and set design. For a low budget film made in the '70s, there was a lot of hard work put into these aspects. I mean, you had a house completely covered in skulls, skeletons, bones, fake flesh, etc. I read up on that a little and found out that there was actually a family living in that house during the filming, geez, that had to suck. I also read that to keep the equipment rental cost to a minimum, the film crew insisted that everyone be willing to work around 16 hours a day, seven days a week for a couple months, that's pretty much a sweatshop mentality, but I suppose it paid off.
So, at the core of the story lies the terrifying concept of an inbred family who kill people for sport and use their bones and flesh for trophy and house decoration, and eat and serve up their meat to unknowing patrons of their little dive gas station and barbecue restaurant. Man...I can see why this movie is ranked among the most terrifying of all time, just in concept alone, writer/director Tobe Hooper has to be one demented dude. To help drive the suspense home, you have a lead actress who spends the last about 20 minutes of the movie running and screaming at the top of her lungs, two things she appears to be very good at, oh, also jumping out of windows, which she does twice. The movie ends at the climax where the faceless simpleton killer, Leatherface, is unable to kill the last of the 5 teens and goes crazy in the street twirling his chainsaw around in what seemed to be a dance routine and then it fades to black. Awesome.
Kicking off a 31 day marathon of horror films has to be done just right, and I'd say this was the perfect choice. One heckuva great horror movie and one that I think really set the bar for how to do a slasher movie right. The take-away for me from this one was: a horror movie with a well execute concept/story is just as effective if not more effective than one where you actually see a ton of detailed, gory deaths.
