Product: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Original Uncut) [Region 2] (1974)
Rating: 5.0
The REAL lesson in low-budget horror
For the many of you who embraced Blair Witch (far more than it deserved) as a noble low-budget cause, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, along with Night of the Living Dead, is the REAL lesson in how to make a low budget horror movie. Unlike the Blair Witch creators, Tobe Hooper still manages to use his meager resources to introduce such apparently novel features as solid story structure; tight functional script; riveting suspense sequences and a (literally) blistering climax. The more one engages with Texas Chainsaw Massacre as a low-budget masterpiece, the more you realize there can be no excuse for the decidedly un-pioneering, artless, suspense-less Blair Witch Project. Hooper's superbly rendered, all-encompassing atmosphere of impending dread and depravity has never been equaled. The dialogue, set design and sound effects interact moodily and powerfully to convey a distinct, unsettling feeling of unprecedented evil closing in on the protagonists. And then the movie DELIVERS on that expectation as well. No stupid wandering around in the woods non-drama for Hooper. Instead his set-up is as compelling as his pay-off is violent (that little irrelevancy called story structure again...) Imagine the horror and intensity of Deliverance and times it by ten to get an idea of what you're in for with Chainsaw. For horror collectors, this is an essential acquisition as one of the key antecedents - and one of the best examples - of the now ubiquitous splatter/slasher sub-genre, as well as the cannibal and mad hillbilly crazes that passed through horror in the seventies. If you thought Bonnie and Clyde, Soldier Blue and The Wild Bunch pushed the envelope of screen violence in the early Seventies, then Texas Chainsaw Massacre saws it to shreds. A must-own for any decent horror collection.