24/12/13 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

Righto, for some reason, this film is considered a, if not the definitive horror film by lots of idiots.

About 25 years ago a local convenience shop got a copy of this film that, somehow, had been awarded the BBFC 'E' rating. 'E' standing for Exempt, a classification normally awarded to educational films and academic stuffs.
Occasionally wily distributors would submit graphic feature films (presumably under the pretence that they were of significant cultural/educational worth) in the hope of being awarded the 'E' certificate, therefore avoiding the draconian restrictions in place during the BBFC's most maidenly period.

Some further reading here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_certificate

And also here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_nasty

Anyway, socio-history bollocks aside, my brother picked up the 'E' copy and bought it home for us to watch. Now, at the time, this film's legend preceded it. If third-hand accounts were to be believed, it was the most terrifying film you could watch, just like The Exorcist and Evil Dead, both of which are far more deserving of such infamy. Both of which were also banned in the UK at the time.

So, sitting down to watch this mythic example of celluloid terror, we was expecting something pretty fucking special. Nope. Instead it was some terribly acted fucking Z-movie shit about a van full of teens who drive off into the sticks and eventually get bloodlessly killed by an unconvincing, fat spacker in a skin-mask with a power-tool and his family of equally un-scary cohorts.

The frequently offered defence is that there was nothing else like this at the time. Well, yeah, maybe it had a bleakness to it (in the last thirty minutes at least) that hadn't been much used at that point. So what? A few years earlier, Get Carter caused outrage because of its violence that actually resembled violence, and it done so much better. Herschell Gordon Lewis had pushed the graphic/splatter boundaries a full ten years before this shit was made.

The acting is terrible, the villain unlikely, the plot is tenuous, the sound and editing are flaccid and uninspired rather than the templates of terror people assume them to be... Oh, fucking whatever. If you consider this shit to be anything other than the fucking bilge that it is, you're a prick.


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072271/
1/10

Perkin.