Texas Chainsaw Massacre 1974 Horror Movie Review

Maybe the first real slasher flick, Tobe hooper wrote (with Kim Henkel) and directed this cult classic about a cannabilistic family living in the backwoods of Texas. The style in which the movie was filmed makes it seem almost like a documentary, and the opening prologue (read by a young John Laroquette) tells the audience that the events depicted by the film are all true, though they weren’t. A group of teens set out to a relative’s abadoned old house for some fun end up one by one encountering Leatherface, a chainsaw weilding madman who wears human skin on his face as a grisly mask. We see such distubing images as a body jerking crazily on the floor from nerve reaction after being beat over the head with a sledge hammer, a girl being hung on a meathook to scream, wriggle, and die slowly, and bodies being stuffed into freezers. Marilyn Burns plays the last, screaming survivor, being captured and tortured (slashed by razors, beat over the head repeatedly with a hammer, and forced to sit in a chair made of human remains) before finally escaping with very little sanity left. Although tame by todays standards, this film was banned in most theatres upon it’s release, and made most viewers physically ill in it’s brutal depiction of macabre murders.rnSide Note: Like Psycho and other movies, events and characters in this film were based on real life serial killer and cannibal Ed Gein, among other real life cannibal killers.