Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The

Released: 1974

MPAA Rating: R

Genre: Slasher

Nuts and Bolts: A group of hippies stop at a south Texas farmhouse in the hopes of finding gas. But instead what they find is the macabre Sawyer family. One by one, the cannibalistic Sawyers lure their prey into a web of grizzly terror.

Summary: This takes place in Muerto County Texas on August 18th 1973. The film starts with the sounds of digging. We then see photograph flashes of various disinterred human remains; hands, skulls, ribs etc. In the background a radio broadcast reveals that local police have found a total of twelve tombs vandalized at the Muerto County Cemetery in the town of Newt.

We then cut to a shot of the roadside where we see the upended remains of a dead armadillo, an apparent victim of road kill. The radio broadcast continues detailing various reports of grim violence from around the nation. Driving down the road are five hippies en route to an old family cottage. Included in this cast of Scoobies are: Jerry, the bespectacled van driver, Kirk the guitar playing stud, Pam the astrologer wannabe, Sally Hardesty the token blonde and her retarded invalid brother Franklin.
Jerry pulls the van off to the side of the road, so Franklin can take a piss. Franklin wheels his ass out onto the shoulder and begins pissing into a tin cup. A truck rushes by scaring Franklin. He loses control of his wheelchair and tumbles down a gully into the weeds. The others hoist his fat ass back up into the van and continue on their way. As they are driving they pass a slaughterhouse. Franklin comments on the rank smell and begins telling stories of how his father used to slaughter cows at the local abattoir. As they drive along, they stop at the Muerto County Cemetery. Sally and Franklin’s grandfather is buried here and she wants to make sure that his grave wasn’t one of the ones that were vandalized. Satisfied with her findings, she climbs back into the van and they continue on their way.

They find a strange looking hitchhiker thumbing down the side of the road. Being a bunch of peace-loving types, they pick him up. (The official movie credits name him only as the Hitchhiker, but later films confirm his name to be Nubbin Sawyer. Whether Nubbin is his true first name or not is unknown. For sake of clarity, I will refer to him as Nubbin for the remainder of this review.)

Nubbin is an ugly bastard with stringy black hair and a wicked burn across his right cheek. Franklin and he begin waxing poetic about cattle slaughter. Without warning, Nubbin suddenly grabs Franklin’s knife from him and begins slicing open his own hand. The group is pretty grossed out by this display of sado-masochism but for some reason, they don’t kick him out of the van. Nubbin also has a camera with him. He snaps a picture of Franklin and demands two dollars for the print. When Franklin refuses to pay him, he burns the photograph causing billows of smoke throughout the van. During the hysteria, he withdraws his own straight razor and slices Franklin across the arm. The Scoobies have finally had enough of Scrappy Doo here and kick him to the curb. As the van is pulling away, Nubbin wipes a smear of blood across the side panel.

They drive along for a little while longer until they stop for gas at a local Bar-B-Q pit. They talk to the station manager who explains that his gas tanks are dry. The kids buy some Bar-B-Q and continue until they get to the Franklin house.

Sally and the others rummage through the remains of her parents’ two-story stone cottage while Franklin is left floundering about downstairs. He’s really pissed off right about now. The heat, his wounds and his lack of mobility send him into a retard’s frenzy and begins sputtering to himself. (He also finds a small nest of animal bones, but neglects to tell any of the others.)

Pam and Kirk decide to visit the local water hole. They travel down a long path between two old sheds at the back of the property and continue until they hear the sounds of a motor running. Over the hill is a barn and an accompanying farmhouse. Kirk figures that maybe they could buy some gasoline from whomever owned the house. Finding no one at the barn, they approach the porch to the farmhouse. After numerous unanswered inquiries Kirk goes inside the house. He walks into the kitchen where a large man with a bloody apron and a flesh mask stands waiting. This is Leatherface (Also known as Bubba). Leatherface is a cannibal who wears the skinned face of his victims as a mask. He clubs Kirk several times with a ball peen hammer and drags his twitching body into the back. When Kirk fails to return outside, Pam begins to get impatient. She enters the house and stumbles into a side room, which is filled with varying human remains. Furniture is assembled from bleached human bones and a chicken trapped in a cage hangs clucking overhead. Pam goes into hysterics from the grim sight and Leatherface attacks her from behind. He drags her screaming into the kitchen and hangs her on a large meat hook. Before her dying eyes, he then begins to sever Kirk’s head with a large chain saw.

Meanwhile back at the farm Sally and Franklin begin arguing. Franklin is obsessed over his experience with the Hitchhiker and is convinced that the sick pickle is going to come looking for him. Sally is sick and tired of listening to the whining retard and begins to get concerned over the disappearance of her friends. Jerry decides to go and look for them.

Jerry follows the trail and ultimately arrives at the same dilapidated farmhouse. He knocks several times until he hears a muffled cry coming from inside the house. He races in and walks into the kitchen. Upon opening an ice-chest he sees Pam’s bleeding body flopping about. Surprisingly, the girl had managed to survive being hung upon a meat hook up until this point. Leatherface leaps out and its hammer time once again. It’s hammer go hammer MC Hammer yo hammer and the rest can go and play. Needless to say, Jerry is down for the count.

Now it is nighttime. Nobody has returned to the van and both Franklin and Sally are uptight. After arguing over a flashlight for some time, they decide to go into the woods in search of their friends. They get about halfway from the road to the farmhouse when Leatherface leaps out again and viciously guts Franklin several times with his chainsaw. Sally runs away screaming.

Leatherface chases her through the woods until she comes upon the farmhouse itself. Poor Sally has NO idea that she is actually fleeing into the lion’s den. She closes the front door behind her and Leatherface takes to it with his chainsaw. Sally runs upstairs where she finds a small bedroom. In it are what appear to be two rotting corpses of unknown age sitting in a set of rocking chairs. Panic stricken she flees out the window.

She continues to run until she reaches the Gas and Bar-B-Q store the group had visited earlier. The storeowner lets her in and closes the door behind him. Sally eases back thinking that she is safe. The storeowner turns around and begins beating her repeatedly with a broomstick. He actually snaps the thing in half over her until she is nearly unconscious. He throws her in a burlap sack and heaves her into his pickup. As they drive, he prods and pokes at her limp form with the broom handle. The pickup pulls up to the farmhouse where we find the skanky looking hitchhiker hopping around in the front yard.

It’s at this time that the viewer realizes that the shop owner, the hitchhiker and Leatherface are all related. The shop owner’s name is Drayton Sawyer and he is the father of Nubbin and Leatherface. (We also find out that Nubbin is the one who was rubbing the graves of Muerto County.) They take Sally into the house and pull the bag off of her. As the girl revives Nubbin goes upstairs to get Grandpa. We now realize that the rotten looking old fucker upstairs is actually ALIVE! They bring Grandpa down and set him at the head of the dining room table. Sally is tied to a chair and placed at the opposite end. The family takes turns teasing and tormenting her. They decide to let Grandpa have the honors of killing her. They give the old man a hammer and lean Sally’s head close to him. Nubbin slices her finger and lets Grandpa suck the blood from the wound. This gives Grandpa just enough lead in his pencil to swing the hammer down. But his manual dexterity ain’t worth a shit and he misses most of the time. Nubbin helps out a bit by taking the hammer from Grandpa’s hand and cracking her across the back of the skull.

Sally eventually manages to escape from their clutches and flee from the house. Nubbin and Leatherface give chase and Nubbin manages to slice her several times across the back with his switchblade. Sally runs out onto the middle of the highway. Nubbin follows suit but is plastered by a big eighteen-wheeler. The truck skids to a stop and the driver gets out just as Leatherface gets to the road. He throws a wrench at Leatherface, which manages to drive him to the ground. As he lands his own chainsaw blade grazes his leg cutting him badly. Sally manages to hitch a ride with another vehicle leaving Leatherface screaming in rage in the center of the road.

Acting/Dialogue: The acting is really well done here. There’s not a lot of demand on the periphery characters, but Marilyn Burns rocked the house as Sally Hardesty. I’m sure its difficult to illustrate to an audience the point between being completely scared out of your mind and going totally over the fucking edge of sanity. But Marilyn pulls it off like a champ and you can freeze-frame the exact point where here mental fortitude irrevocably shatters. But Edwin Neal really takes the cake as the Hitchhiker. I truly believe that he wasn’t acting during the course of this film. I really do believe that he is a certifiable whack-a-loon nutcase.

Gore: Surprisingly, there’s not a lot of gore in this flick. Director Tobe Hooper didn’t have the budget to go all out with a splatter fest extravaganza. The strange thing is, I have MEMORIES of this movie being a lot gorier than it actually is. This is a perfect example of the director allowing the viewer’s imagination to fill in the gaps.

Guilty Pleasures: There’s no nudity but Sally is apparently one of those bra-burning hippies. She looks fairly ‘perky’ throughout most of the film.

The Good: This is one of the few films that is deserving of every bit of praise that it receives. There’s a popular urban legend that states that the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was based on a true story. This is fairly inaccurate although it does have its roots in real life crime history. The backdrop of the Sawyer family was loosely based on the serial killer Edward Gein. Gein’s exploits inspired several movie characters including Robert Bloch’s infamous psycho Norman Bates as well as Thomas Harris’ character Jame (Buffalo Bill) Gumb. Director Tobe Hooper made the entire affair all the more realistic by way of an extremely simple and yet effective trick; the beginning monologue.

The film opens with a short narrative (voiced by Night Court’s John Larroquette) detailing the traumatic events suffered by survivor Sally Hardesty and her brother. For years, I thought that TCM was based on an actual family and that there really was a sick fuck out there named Leatherface. Unfortunately, there are actual people out there who make Leatherface seem tame by comparison. (And no I’m not talking about Pauly Shore.)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre was filmed on a paltry budget of $140,000 and Tobe knew how to make that money work for him. Due to its lack of budget, TCM is filmed with a grainy looking 16mm Kodak camera, but this only serves to enhance the grisly nature of the film. I’m sure that if it were done today using state of the art camera techniques and lighting, it wouldn’t be able to instill the same down-home eerie quality that the original raw footage provides. (Note: As of this writing, there is talk of a TCM remake in the works reportedly being helmed by Michael Bay. Didn’t these guys learn ANYTHING from Psycho 98? Don’t fuck with the classics!) Anyway, back to the review.

Because of the lack of funds, there is also little to no gore involved with this flick. Now while that may disappoint some, I don’t think it hampered this film one iota. It is a sick, disturbing movie despite its lack of blood. It just goes to show that what we don’t see is five times as horrific as what we do see. It’s the motivations behind the villains that drives this film. Whereas movie icons such as Pinhead or Jason Voorhees are fairly indifferent to their victims’ suffering, the Sawyers actually revel in it. Papa Sawyer gleefully prods at Sally with a broken broom handle as if she were one of the cows down at the slaughterhouse (The movie states that Pop works at the slaughterhouse along with his sons, as well as working at the gas station.)

Leatherface is just a retard who doesn’t know any better. A huge illiterate leviathan, Bubba Sawyer suffers from extreme personality disorders. He is never seen without one of his skin masks on and this only makes him all the more mysterious and horrifying. It appears that his only desire is to please his brother and father. He’s actually a fairly paranoid sort of chap and who loses his mind at the thought of being exposed.

I love how all the feature characters appear to be seemingly unrelated at first. You know from the get-go that Hitchhiker is going to return. Franklin is convinced that he is a marked man due to the ritualistic burning of the photograph and the eerie blood smear wiped on the side of the van. However, there is nothing in the beginning of the film to indicate that he is in any way tied to either the gas station attendant or to Leatherface. The same holds true for Pop Sawyer. When we first see him he offers the hippies some barbecue food from inside his station. Upon initial viewing the scene is rather incidental but in retrospect we now realize that the kids were likely dining on the fleshy remains of a human victim. Ultimately it all comes together once Pop brings Sally home and we see Hitcher flailing about in the driveway.

There’s a strange unspecified relationship going on here. I’m left with the impression that the Hardestys are related to the Sawyers in some way. Sally and Franklin’s maternal grandmother’s surname was Franklin. When the characters stop at the gas station they ask Sawyer if he knows where the Franklin house is. Now, the house in question had obviously not been lived in for many many years, so it strikes me odd that anyone would recognize it by the name Franklin House. And yet, Sawyer seems to know exactly what they are talking about. This could be because the Sawyer farmhouse is right next-door, but I think there’s more going on here than just that. Franklin mentions early in the film that his father used to work at the local slaughterhouse. We come to learn later that Drayton, Hitcher and Grandpa all make their living there. Coincidence? There’s also a scene where Franklin comes upon a pile of animal bones lying upon the floor of the Franklin house. Now these aren’t someone’s leftover buffalo wings mind you. There’s also a weird little bone left hanging from the lintel of the doorway. Why would the Sawyers feel the need to decorate an abandoned house when they have plenty of their own property to fuck up? The Sawyers are also a male dominated family. (There are no existing female Sawyers in either of the first two films). When Hitcher gets into the van at the beginning, Franklin is the only person in the vehicle that he ever speaks to directly. Coincidentally despite his mental ineptitude, Franklin appears quite knowledgeable of techniques used for slaughtering cattle. He’s also the one that Hitcher attacks and ‘marks’ for death. I get the impression that Hitcher is aware of some kind of unspoken relation between himself and Franklin. They can smell their own. In the film’s sequel we are introduced to Sally and Franklin’s uncle Lefty Enright. Lefty is not exactly sane himself and he also appears to be quite handy with a buzz saw (A hereditary trait perhaps?). Now while I realize that my observations are very superficial, I think there’s enough there to provide a little food for thought (pun intended).

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a film that is scary and perversely disturbing as well. To this day, it is the ONLY horror movie that actually gives me the creeps and forces me to read the ingredients on the back of a can of meat ravioli before buying it.

The Bad: Geez. I really can’t think of anything bad to say about this flick. I guess the worst part of it is its overall length. It’s not even an hour and a half. I think they could have extended it by another twenty minutes or so and given us a bit more with the Sawyer family. I would’ve loved to see an explanation as to why Grandpa is still alive despite looking like a Tom Savini animatronic.

Great Lines:

“There's just some things in life you got to do. Don't mean you have to like it.” --Drayton Sawyer.

“If I have any more fun today I don't think I can take it!” --Franklin bitching about his miserable vacation.

Overall Rating: 10 out of 10 severed heads.

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