There is a fortune of gore and suspense in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre where a group of teenagers ultimately falls in the arms of a family of homicidal maniacs. In this gleefully imaginative lo-fi horror, things happen in formula. Teenagers get to a desolated part of the countryland, and they get killed - in a wearying manner, their fates as we all know would meet dead ends. (We have watched them seven thousand times already, haven't we now?) But the main villain, a murderous chainsaw-wielding maniac simply named "Leatherface," in this and what the following incarnations of this picture, makes up for one of the most terrifying and disturbing figures in horror cinema.
There's no denying that writer-director Tobe Hooper does excellent in his job and his vehemence towards the movie is beyond admirable. His images demands beckoning, regardless if it's disturbance or fascination, and they reinforce the movie's intensity in ways I could only struggle to explain. This however, he does at the expense on how the picture should be crafted. Notwithstanding this, the movie sucks you right in with scenes that showcase heightened suspense and terror. And in that moment that you were, there is not a grip that is tight to restrict.
Our set of teenagers comprise of stereotypes and losing them one by one seemed to just have float by you. You only care about what happens with Leatherface and his murderous kin - The Cook, The Hitchhiker and The Grandfather - and what ghoulish kind of demise shall they put on the victim's backs.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a less frequent shocker, but when it does, it hits you right in the core. Deliciously demented, excellently imaginative and efficiently grotesque, there's little, or in fact no, questioning as of why it became a cult classic.
Is the upcoming revisiting (starring Percy Jackson star Alexandra Daddario) of this picture going to capture what the original had? I am dubious. And in this, I shan't be alone.
VERDICT: A-
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