Product: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Original Uncut) [Region 2] (1974)
Rating: 4.0
Grim but good horror
Some movies you see make you feel good about life and optimistic about how things are going. You leave such films with a song in your heart and a smile on your face. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is not one of those movies. That is not to say it is a bad movie - in fact, it is pretty good - but it is not a happy movie.The story itself is rather simple. In rural Texas, a group of young adults encounter a demented family and are killed off one by one. Unlike their cinematic descendants such as Jason or Freddy Kreuger, who are in their own way the heroes of their movies, the villains in this film are wholly unpleasant...dirty, brutal, twisted and without anything more than an animalistic sense of cleverness.The protagonists, while generally sympathetic, are also rather bland. The only one with a real personality is the wheelchair-bound brother of the main character, and he is not very likable. In this way, they are not unlike most slasher movie victims. I actually began to think of the movie as a sinister version of a Scooby Doo mystery with the quintet stumbling into a crime story from which most will not emerge.Although often hard to watch because of its dark subject matter, this movie is actually rather bloodless and the worst of the violence is shot at angles or lighting that spares the viewer. The low-budget nature of the movie helps the general creepiness, similar to the (also very good) Night of the Living Dead. This is not a perfect movie, and it is definitely not for many people's tastes, but for a slasher flick, it is entertaining and in its own way, a little bit of a classic.