“Chain Saw” is a disreputable exploitation flick made with such artistry that it transforms into high art. Like comedy, it also depends on the shock of the unexpected. Horror has always been about repressed pleasures. But this is his first that feels like one. His movies have long paid homage to the delirious blood baths of the grind-house era. But instead of compromising his aesthetic, indulging in the traditional muck of the genre actually loosens and expands that aesthetic. You might say he finally gives the horror crowd what they’re paying for.
TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE STORY MOVIE
In one pointed sequence, West juxtaposes a scene of staged seduction with one of real menace, underlining the echoing tension.Įven if Ti West identities with the director, he doesn’t give him the better argument.Īfter making a series of elegant, slow-burn scary films like “The Innkeepers” and “The House of the Devil” that have earned critical praise if not blockbuster grosses, West has now made a movie full of flamboyantly gory kills and leering sex scenes. This is the cultural backdrop of “X,” but also in part its subject, and the film keeps searching for the intersection between sex and violence. At a time when the reputation of scary movies was much lower, pornography was being taken seriously. They shared some of the same artists, audiences and grimy theaters. His sitting ducks are making a low-budget pornographic movie inspired by the success of “Debbie Does Dallas.” It helps to know that “Chain Saw” was made by a seedy New York company, Bryanston Distributing, that was flush from the success of the famous sex film “Deep Throat.” The line between horror and porn was blurry in the 1970s. He can overdo it (we didn’t need the “Shining” reference), but while the contours of the plot are straight out of “Chain Saw” - city kids jump into a van heading into rural Texas before stumbling upon a house of horrors - he is smart enough to tell his own story. With these images, West is working the erogenous zones of horror fans. Rob Zombie’s gnarly Firefly trilogy (“ House of 1000 Corpses,” “ The Devils’ Rejects,” “ 3 From Hell”) and the original and remake of “The Hills Have Eyes” (both terrific) capture the relatable dread of a dysfunctional family, taken to a Grand Guignol extreme. The best movies made in the spirit of “Chain Saw” grasp that the source of its deepest madness is the family dynamics. It’s a deft, disquieting little shocker, but unlike the 1974 “Chain Saw,” which has an unhinged spirit that even after many viewings makes you think anything could happen, the twists in “Fresh” are a little too predictable to really jar sensibilities. But when the main character says he’s from Texas and his mother has died, horror die-hards will tense up in recognition. It takes places in a world seemingly distant from Texas massacres. More novel is the slickly entertaining “Fresh,” an urban horror story about the hell of modern dating in which a single woman meets the perfect guy, who it turns out isn’t. The result is a boringly rote series of slayings. It abandons the nuance of the original, adopting the Gleiberman view of Leatherface as a one-note killing machine. The recent Netflix reboot of “T exas Chainsaw” has the opposite problem. He is closer to the misunderstood creature from “Frankenstein” than to a garden-variety slasher villain. Without resorting to a tedious back story, the movie positions Leatherface as a monster and a victim, bullied into his dirty work by his cannibalistic family. While he is introduced committing some of the most startling kills in cinematic history, the majestically maniacal last act of “Chain Saw” shifts our perspective on him from hulking slayer to stammering stooge. Gleiberman was on solid ground with “Halloween,” whose killer is a psychology-less abstraction, murdering without motivation, but Leatherface is more than just a boogeyman.
“It expresses his identity,” he writes of Leatherface, “and his identity is that he has no identity.”
In a Variety review last year, Owen Gleiberman drew the ire of horror fans when he called “Halloween” a “knockoff” of “Chain Saw,” then defended his stance in an essay locating the signature of both movies in the killer’s mask. While every bit as intense as its title, its violence is staged with misdirection absent from the sequels and remakes.Īnother misperception, internalized even by experienced and admiring critics, involves its most famous character, Leatherface.
The movie is less bloody than its reputation. Despite its unsubtle title, this is a formally exquisite art film, packed full of gorgeously nightmarish images, as poetic as they are deranged. The peculiar strengths of “Chain Saw” have rarely been replicated because they are often misunderstood.
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