Threat Quality Press

(Holland here. Every October, I take the opportunity to make up for the fact that as a kid, due to concerned parenting and a lack of cable in my household, I missed the vast majority of scary movies.)

I was actually most excited this year about “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” a horror classic I would’ve caught over the last two Octobers, if everyone on Netflix hadn’t had the same idea each year. I was also most worried. I’m not a gore-fan, and that seemed to be this movie’s claim to fame – it’s legendarily gory, right?

By the time I hit my teenage years, I had realized psychological horror was much more interesting and long-lasting than visual gore – but that still didn’t send me seeking out the splatterfests that get so much attention in the horror genre.

So I popped in “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” telling myself how, as an adult, and given the relative crudity of special effects 30 years ago, I probably wouldn’t be so unnerved by the spectacle of a guy in a crappy people-mask cutting screaming teens apart with a chainsaw. I’ve watched special features on zombie movies, I get the low-budget craft Fangoria nerds drool over, so…no problem!

I told myself this nervously, because I wasn’t sure how much I actually believed it. This is, after all, a Classic Of The Genre. It must have something to it that even my film-101 observational skills couldn’t take into account.

The good news: I was right, and objectively, there is nothing scary in this film for an adult. The bad news: this may have been one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.

Not one of the worst horror movies; one of the worst things ever committed to celluloid.

Yes, it’s ineptly directed. Though I suppose if I were making a movie with a budget of ten bucks and the use of my uncle’s van for the weekend, I’d try to get as much mileage out of little tricks like needlessly zooming in and out as I could.

Yes, it’s poorly-written. To the extent that it’s written at all. The first third has that awful “improv” style of dialogue you sometimes find in horror films. (You know, like how the only thing you can remember about “The Blair Witch Project” is people arguing over a goddamn map for 90 minutes.)

Yes, even at 80 minutes, it’s overly long. It breaks down as: 35 minutes of suffering through the characters’ roadtrip through backwoods Texas; 20 minutes of four characters being killed clumsily by a retarded man with a chainsaw; 20 minutes of the last victim held captive during the cannibal-hillbilly-family’s dinner and screeeeeeeaaaammmming while they’re laaaaaaaauuuuuggghhhhhing; then finally 5 minutes of escape.

(That last scene is made all the more hilariously stupid by the fact that when a semi pulls over to help the girl, the driver and the girl narrowly avoid Leatherface by ducking into the cab…and then, rather than driving away, they climb back out the passenger side to sneak up on their attacker so they can hit him with a wrench.)

But the worst part is the sense of nihilism that’s inescapable in this film, a belief in nothing except its own supposed savagery and edginess. But that’s not horror, it’s just hatefulness.

It hates its characters enough to make them so annoying that the viewer gets a bit antsy waiting for them to fucking DIE already…and yet still wants our sympathy by forcing us to watch, at grueling length, just how helpless the last girl is in the face of captivity.

It hates its lead (Leatherface) by making him nothing more than, well, a retarded guy with a chainsaw who seems to just wait around for passersby to wander into his house (not the most efficient method of serial murder, my friend). It’s not a character, it has no motivation beyond blind psychopathic stupidity, and yet we’re still supposed to be afraid of him and his murderous family, because they’re the ones with the knives.

This was an abusive movie, for both the hastily-drawn characters and the audience that has to follow them. And for the life of me, I can’t understand how there were five follow-ups to something that had this little going for it.

This entry was posted on October 7, 2008 at 1:10 am and is filed under Jeff Holland with tags Jeff Holland, October Horror, poetics, Stomping Around in the Dark 08. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.