If you ask horror aficionados which movie tops their list of the greatest of all-time,chances are,the vast majority will cite tonight's entry(OR one we'll be looking at sometime next month)as the granddaddy of 'em all.Few films can boast of capturing real,honest to goodness terror within their frames,but if any have ever done so,this one has.So effectively,it would seem,that former college professor and director of tonight's feature,Tobe Hooper,has never been able to live up to it,or escape from the shadow of it.Even Gunnar "Leatherface" Hansen learned early on,that taking a girl to see his exploits on the big screen probably isn't the world's greatest idea for a first date(Lamberto Bava's Demoni(1985) was always my movie of choice,as many of you women lucky enough to have dated me out there can attest).Loosely based on the handiwork of the "Butcher of Plainfield",Wisconsin's infamous serial killer,Ed Gein,and inspired by the growing brutality of the changing culture of the seventies and governmental falsehoods heaped upon the unsuspecting populace.It stood as the single most successful independent film ever made,until Halloween dethroned it four years later.
My first exposure to tonight's review dates back to the pre-rental days of video,when twenty bucks of my allowance was spent buying a grainy unlabeled bootleg out of the back of a black van in Edwardsville(no lie!),and upon being popped into my eight hundred dollar wood grain top loader,instantly became a regularly watched favorite of me and the boys,with deadpan imitations of Edwin Neal and Jim Siedow not an unusual sound around my house.I can't remember ever seeing broad daylight so effectively used to evoke harrowing feelings of terror the way Hooper does here.And when the sun goes down,well that's another story.The finale has got to be one of the most memorably maddening experiences ever committed to celluloid,drawing reserved reviews of praise from critics and moviegoers alike.With a brilliant pre-credit sequence delivered by John "Night Court" Larroquette(!) scrolling upwards,nothing could have prepared us for the most bizzare crimes in the annals of American history that were to follow...
The Hitchhiker(Edwin Neal) sure knows how to break the ice on awkward van rides,or head cheese,Polaroids,gun powder,straight razors,and you.
Sally(Burns)and her yappy invalid brother,Franklin(Partain),drive across the state of Texas on a sweltering summer day with Jerry(Allen Danziger),Kirk(William Vail),and Pam(McMinn) in a van to investigate recent news reports of grave robbery and corpse defilement in state cemeteries,and see if their grandfather's plot is among those that have been tampered with.On the way to a family property with a much needed swimming hole afterwards,the group stops to pick up a weird hitchhiker(Neal)along the road,who leeringly rambles about his family's history as slaughterhouse workers,the pros and cons of bolt gun steer execution,and his brother's head cheese,before taking Franklin's pocket knife and slicing his own palm open with it.He then takes a Polaroid of the fat chatterbox on wheels and demands five dollars for it.When Franklin declines to pay,the hitchhiker blows the picture up with a small pile of gun powder,and cuts Franklin's forearm with a straight razor before being forced out of the van,and giving half hearted chase,kicking the vehicle and giving the terrified youths raspberries.They stop at a gas station,where the proprietor(Siedow) tells them he's out of gas,then feeds them his own barbeque.They decide to drive ahead to the Hardesty property,returning to the gas station after the fuel truck makes its delivery.After arriving at the abandoned house and discovering the watering hole has dried up,Kirk and Pam decide to walk to a nearby house and ask the residents for gas.After disgusting his girlfriend with a human tooth he finds on the front porch,he goes inside,only to have the bejeezus clobbered out of his domepiece with a sledgehammer by a hulking retard in an apron,wearing a human skin mask.When Kirk doesn't return,Pam enters and stumbles into a room mobbed with piles of animal and human bones,some of which have been fashioned into garish,macabre furniture.As she tries to escape,she is chased down and dragged back inside by the lumbering murderer(Hansen),and slammed onto a meathook,where she is forced to watch as Leatherface perforates her dead boyfriend with a smoking chainsaw on a table in front of her disbelieving eyes.
Betcha didn't read this in your horoscope,Pam(Terri McMinn)!
As the sun begins to set upon the Hardesty house,Jerry sets out to find Kirk and Pam,who've never returned from their attempted swimming excursion.After finding their blanket outside,Jerry enters the neighboring house,only to discover a half dead,bluish Pam inside a freezer,before getting brained by Leatherface's mallet.As night descends on Sally and her brother,they take a lone flashlight into the thick brush in attempt to find their friends.As Franklin calls out their names,he's interrupted by Leatherface,who springs out of the blackness,bissecting him in his wheelchair with his revving chainsaw to the horror of his screaming sister.Sally runs from the squealing monster,unwittingly into the killer's house,and is greeted upstairs by the inert remains of an elderly couple propped up in easy chairs,before jumping out a second story window,and running the entire distance to the gas station they'd visited earlier,with Leatherface close behind.The cook reassures the hysterical girl at first,but then clobbers her with a broom handle and hogties her in a sack,throwing his acquisition into his truck and driving off into the night.Outside the house,he picks up the hitchhiker,and then chastises he and his younger brother,Leatherface,for what he's done to the door with his chainsaw(!).Inside,Sally comes to,to find herself in the middle of an ongoing nightmare,bound to a chair made of human bones,at a dinner table surrounded by bickering,hooting and hollering cannibals.Leatherface has donned a mask made of a girl's face,and appropriately applied makeup to it,before he and his brother fetch their elderly,vampiric grandfather(John Dugan) to kill the girl,as he was,afterall,the best killer there ever was.They hold the screaming captive's head over a metal apple barrel,but the ancient psychopath is too weak to wield the mallet,and drops it repeatedly.While they bicker back and forth,Sally manages to free herself and jump through a window.As she runs,the hitchhiker sweepingly slashes her with his straight razor,but unknowingly strolls into the path of an oncoming eighteen wheeler,which runs him over and kills him.Leatherface attacks the truck cab,but the driver throws a monkey wrench,hitting him in the head,buying Sally enough time to jump into the flatbed of a passing pick up truck.She giggles hysterically,in shock,as the sight of a furious Leatherface,angrily spinning swinging his chainsaw in circles in the middle of the highway,gets further and further away.
Leatherface(Gunnar Hansen) gives a Poulan-derived STFU to mouthy cripple,Franklin(Paul Partain).
Tonight's entry spawned several sequels,a terrible Michael Bay remake,and a subsequent prequel,none of which ever recaptured the greatness of the original(big surprise).Hooper followed it up with Eaten Alive(1977),Salem's Lot(1979),The Funhouse(1981),Poltergeist(1982),Lifeforce(1985),Invaders from Mars(1986),and the first sequel in 1986(all of which range from decent to excellent),before falling off big time.Burns,the lovely Pennyslvanian,played Linda Kasabian in the tele-picture Helter Skelter(1976),and genre fare like Hooper's Eaten Alive and Future Kill(1985).Neal has worked steadily ever since in films and television in everything from Power Rangers to Nick Palumbo's excellent Murder Set Pieces(2004),and is a real pisser to talk to.Hansen has also kept busy in mosty genre fare,with roles in Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers(1985) and the aforementioned Murder Set Pieces on his impressive resume.You can find most of these rascals at horror conventions on a lucky weekend.We depart the classics for now and set our sights back on the familiar shores of mediocrity in July,with an occasional masterpieces thrown in for good measure,as usual.TCM stands as either number one or two of all-time,depending on my mood at the time of query,and for that impressive status,a perfect scale rating is bequeathed upon it,and a full recommendation from your(not so)humble N...
Sally(Marilyn Burns),up to her glutes in piles of animal and human bones,wonders where her hosts buy their curtains.
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