Product: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Original Uncut) [Region 2] (1974)
Rating: 5.0
Saw Has Always Been King
In 1974 cartoonist SR Bissette (of Swamp Thing) was in charge of the campus film program at Johnson State College in Johnson, Vt. He was an is my best friend, and we've done much professional work together, but it all goes back to the buzz about a great horror flick we'd heard back then; Bissette managed to secure a print for projection in the college's Dibden Auditorium. In our early 20's and die hard film and horror buffs, we promoted Saw's coming, and a packed house of over 500 stoned college kids sat down for those remarkable opening credits. At the climactic height of the screen as art teacher named Howie Romero (not George) started a chainsaw in the exacted middle of the theater. Bissette and I were in the projection booth, and I looked down at the main floor to see an ever widening circle of vacant space spread from the center of the theater, leaving Romero standing there having a little Homelite (he had smuggled it in under a trenchcoat). After the pandimonium died down, we resumed the film. For the next two weeks Leatherface lurked in every dark closet, every dim alley on campus, not just for me, but for half the campus. I devoted the next several years in compiling and writing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Scrapbook, the single handmade copy of which I recently sold in a flea market in Florida for $20. Saw is, and always has been, the most well crafted and inspired film in the horror genre, and poor old "Pubie Hooper" (so nicknamed for his alledged propensity for [the relationship]with his females leads, especially in Lifeforce) has yet to achieve the pure inspiration of filmmaking again. And Kim Henkle is the real unsung hero of this movie, along with Gunnar Hanson, who's years of bitterness finally gave way to a reunion of the recent DVD commentary. Saw it a truely great and landmark piece of cinema, and perhaps one of the two or three truely terrifying movie experiences available.