Dear “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974), was common sense invented in 1975?
These characters don’t have two brain cells to rub together. Genuinely, they have the survival instincts of a hard-boiled egg.
For starters, I’ve never been a fan of idiot plots (when the story only works or only happens because the characters are idiots) since there are no stakes. As a viewer, you can check out emotionally because you already know that they’re going to make the worst choice possible in any situation. There’s no hope of avoiding the ending. There’s no tension.
But to make matters worse, the movie starts by almost completely spoiling the ending.
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a movie that believes less in ‘show, don’t tell.’ After reading aloud a massive spoiler, the movie treats you to several minutes of pitch black.
The introduction might have been experimental and cool when the film was first released, but in an age where our screens are highly reflective, it doesn’t work because it isn’t especially scary to be staring at your reflection, waiting for the movie to properly start.
When it does finally ‘start’, you get to enjoy an incredibly slow-moving plot.
You’d think that with all the lollygagging this movie did, they would’ve had the time to develop the characters past: Jerry (curly-haired hippie/driver), Kirk (slightly mean hippie), Pam (astrology-loving hippie), Sally (hippie and Franklin’s sister), Franklin (paraplegic who is weirdly into the cow-butchering process), hitchhiker, gas station owner and Leatherface.
The movie never explains why Kirk (William Vail) and Pam (Teri McMinn) joined Sally (Marilyn Burns) and Franklin (Paul A. Partain) to visit their family grave. Slight aside, I actually thought Kirk and Sally were dating and that Jerry and Pam were a couple.
I mean, there are a lot of things they never explain:
Spoilers ahead
–What the point of having a paraplegic roll down a hill was
-How the gas station owner is related to the hitchhiker and Leatherface. It seems like he’s a relative of theirs, but it is unclear.
-Who Leatherface is
-Why no one ever locks their doors
-Whether the abandoned house belongs to Sally and Franklin’s dad/grandfather’s, and why it was abandoned
-How Leatherface, the gas station guy and the hitchhiker were able to get away with murdering enough people to make a home’s worth of decor. How did people not catch on to them when a significant number of people went missing in that area?
-Why the killers were like that
-Why the truck driver and Sally climbed out of the truck instead of just hitting the gas
-How the ‘mystery gang’ was fooled into eating human barbecue. Genuinely, barbecue has never looked remotely like that, and as Texans, they should know.
-Bloodborne pathogens
-What the symbol the hitchhiker scrawled on the van was. It had to mean something, right? Otherwise, Franklin was beating a dead horse for no reason.
-Who made the noise that drew Jerry into the house? It was clearly a giggle, but Leatherface seemed to be surprised to see him, and Pam was half dead in the freezer. If she were cognizant enough to call him over, you’d think it’d be with a ‘HELP ME!’
End of spoilers
The one thing the movie did mostly right was the concept of Chekhov’s gun (to grossly simplify it, if you’re going to introduce something, it better mean something later).
The endless droning of the news on the radio explains why Sally, Jerry and Franklin are on this trip. The radio also reveals a ‘plot twist’ that will come up later. Franklin’s talk of the butchering process returns in several ways later on in the movie.
The general premise makes sense; it’s the execution that left me scratching my head. As does, why many people consider this movie to be a horror classic.
The movie is long and drawn out. The story is full of holes. It wasn’t scary (I literally went and got gas alone at night after watching it and wasn’t even a little bit scared, iykyk). It’s actually really pretty boring, and it’s also headache-inducing. I’m surprised Sally even has a voice after all the screaming she does.
If it wasn’t for the fact that I signed up to watch the remake, I wouldn’t have even finished it. This movie was a waste of time and had me questioning the point of horror movies.
