Review #180: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

This review was originally written in 2022.

Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #35: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

I saw (and reviewed) this movie for the first time about five years ago, after having only seen a handful of the other entries in the series. Looking back on it now, I'm a lot more lukewarm than I was before. I really just don't think this is a very good movie; I understand that horror was a lot less well-defined in 1974 than it is today, and a lot of the skilled filmmakers that have made fantastic movies in the last fifty years were shaped by the experimentation that came from these earlier decades of cinema, so I don't want to make it sound like I don't see why Texas Chainsaw was an influential film; I just don't see why people nowadays might consider this a good film on its own merits.

For those who haven't seen it, this film follows a group of friends on a road trip through Texas. They stop at their destination and then wander off onto the property of a cannibal hillbilly family, who kills almost all of them and then the movie ends. If it wasn't clear through that description, VERY LITTLE happens in this film. There's a scene at the beginning where they pick up a hitchhiker whose entire direction seems to have been "Hey, act really off-putting", and then there's a LOT of hemming, hawing, and wandering around. And then with no preamble whatsoever, characters get killed. The other characters go looking for them. Then those characters suddenly get killed. Almost the entire actual content of the film comes from the last twenty minutes, most of which is just the female lead running around screaming.

Don't get me wrong- there's some very creepy stuff in this movie, particularly the parts with the cannibal hillbilly family's grandpa, who looks like a dried-out corpse but he's woken up when they cut the female lead's finger and put it in his mouth so he can drink her blood (but don't get too excited, he's not a vampire, he's just an elderly cannibal). The dinner scene is certainly very unsettling, but it's too little too late in my opinion. The entire movie feels so incredibly amateurish, which itself isn't a problem but it needs to be accompanied by something interesting or compelling or else it's just going to be amateurish. This one doesn't really have anything interesting, it just has "gross". "Hey, what if this scene was gross?" seems to have been the director's entire idea. I just didn't have a good time watching it.

Oh, and can I nitpick for a minute? The entire reason the friends were on the road trip, was so the two leads, Sally and Franklin, could go visit their (now abandoned) childhood home. ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE seems to have forgotten that this was the reason, because it is NEVER pointed out that the cannibal hillbilly family WAS THEIR LITERAL NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBORS. You would think that would be a noteworthy detail, right? Or else they could have set the movie at any other location. Literally anything except "the house directly next to where we grew up". It's such a minor detail I can't help but think THE DIRECTOR forgot, because again, they could have set it ANYWHERE and it would have been just as significant. There could have been some really interesting character development when the cannibal hillbillies realize, "Oh crap, these people we've been killing aren't faceless strangers, that's little Sally and Franklin!" (It's not even like this was that long ago; the cook they met at the gas station would absolutely remember his closest neighbor from ten years ago.) Franklin's disability could have even been tied in- put a line of dialogue about "We moved away because the neighbor's kid hurt Franklin's legs when playing with a knife and he hasn't been able to walk since". But that doesn't fit into the director's apparent idea of "Hey, what if this scene was gross?" so it's a missed opportunity.

I don't blame anyone for liking this film, but I would certainly love to know what there is to like.

Overall Rating: 4/10 Wheelchair-Bound Protagonists

A Question I Have to Ask: What happened to the semi truck driver at the end? He just kind of, completely disappears from the film immediately after showing up.