Anyway, there's probably little need to tell you what goes on in this film. It's famous and even if you haven't seen it (which I hadn't until the end of August) you still know it through the many films it's influenced and Simpsons jokes referencing it. If you've seen any of the modern slasher films, too, the plot will feel familiar — a group of kids on a trip to the country meet some bad folks and some grisly ends — but this was the landmark of the genre and if not the very first was certainly the most important. As such it should be treated as a historical piece as well as an individual work.
It's quite fun to look at the similarities with Star Wars. They're both pioneering films, financially successful, enormously influential and spawned several terrible sequels. Both directors gained great acclaim but never quite reached those heights again and had — creatively at least — quite disappointing careers. And they both had beards. But that's a little unfair on Tobe Hooper and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a much better film than Star Wars. But it's not a great film and to be honest I was a little underwhelmed seeing it for the first time after all the hype and expectation.
The first half hour works well, deftly building up tension in the usual way (see earlier comments on Suspiria). Then they get to the creepy old house, the tension ratchets up a few notches and the chain sawing starts. It's superb stuff — terrifying and visceral and very exciting. And considering it was made in 1974 when the audience's taste for such things wasn't quite as high as it is now makes it all the more impressive. I can quite believe all the stories about people fainting in cinemas and having to be stretchered out.
But then the film takes a bizarre left turn for the final act. We get to share a meal with Leatherface and his family and I'm not ashamed to admit I just didn't get it. It's a very poor attempt at black comedy, almost as if Hooper wanted to do a version of The Munsters but without being funny, and fits very strangely into the film that had gone before. Here's a quote from Wikipedia on the film's sequel, made in 1986:
"The emphasis in this sequel is on black comedy, which director Tobe Hooper believed was present in the first film, but unacknowledged by viewers because of its realistic and shocking content."
I like the way they say that Hooper believed it was present, as if he couldn't be sure. Or maybe he tried to put it in but it turned out so badly he decided that it wasn't there after all. Whatever the story, I'm afraid this spoiled the film for me a little. I'm happy to ignore those scenes and concentrate on the good points, of which there are plenty, but I shouldn't have to do that in a top 250 film.
We actually saw this at Frightfest in London so they had a Q+A with the director himself afterwards. I say Q+A, but it was more like nauseatingly fanboyish leading questions and embarrassingly stilted answers. A good public speaker Tobe Hooper is not and I did feel a bit sorry for the man, forced to answer these inane questions from some guy who had once written a GCSE Film Studies essay about him. One comment that did interest me, though, was when Hooper was attempting to show how different he was trying to be with the film. "No Hollywood film would have the actor jump through two windows," he proudly says. And he's probably right, but not necessarily in a good way. You can watch the interview on Youtube and he also talks a little about the black comedy aspect of the film. Mercifully a lot of the most cringe-worthy questions seem to be cut out.
I don't want to sound too critical about it because we had a good time watching it and I would still recommend it highly to anyone. And it's certainly an "important" film in the history of cinema. It's not a masterpiece, though, but why should it have to be?
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