"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974)

Exploitation classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a nasty piece of business. For all its long-time clawing to the top of the horror classic pantheon, it is somewhat startling to see, in spite of the film’s well-earned reputation, that the film features little to distinguish it as something obviously entertaining. It is frightening but not in a conventional sense. Unlike the slasher flicks it would help inspire, the film has little interest in turning the picked-off murders into an act of moral damnation or mounting tension. Despite a grisly sense of black humor, the film is ugly, brutal and unrelenting. It sits more comfortably with the extreme horror films of today, such as The Devil’s Rejects or Hostel, than the horror of its heyday. Texas Chainsaw is horror in the most literal sense, where there is no sense of escape and people seem to suffer because the world is cruel, menacing and unforgiving. Its ceaseless sadism, filtered through a gritty docu-realistic style, left it little loved in its own time but it slowly developed into a cult classic. Five young people, two of which are a wheelchair bound guy and his sister, take a trip to an old, dilapidated house (where some of them used to live) and slowly they get picked off by a nearby deranged family of cannibals, including the now infamous Leatherface. Like Last House on the Left, some of this could be seen as a commentary on the Vietnam War and the needless violence and casualties. But the political subtext (which, in fact, the cast and crew deny) is buried and far from the film’s primary interests. Instead, the film thrives more on a disturbing sense of atmosphere and a refusal to let up on the unbearably excruciating action on display. But there’s a real sense of craft underneath the unabated terror that director Tobe Hooper and cinematographer Daniel Pearl lend the film. This is a vividly yet viciously roughshod vision of Texas.

Grade: A-