Hi, boils and ghouls.  (God, that’s a horrible joke.  I bet it still shows up in countless hack pieces related to Halloween.)  Bryan is back again, with more stupidly long-winded critiques of movies that you’ve probably never seen.  Hopefully, I convince you to see them.  Well, just one of them, at least.  You can probably figure out which one.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, directed by Tobe Hooper): 10/10

One interesting thing about this movie is how it’s not entirely original. Really, nothing here was being done for the first time. Movies about motiveless sociopathic murderers had been done long before, most notably in Psycho, but with plenty of other examples. And in the late 60s and early 70s, horror movies were undergoing a renaissance in which all the old creaky rules had been thrown out in favor of a newer, bleaker, much more brutal paradigm. Night of the Living Dead was of course the one which had the most influence, but even that one got some of its ideas from elsewhere; check out The Last Man On Earth and tell me that George Romero didn’t steal a few traits for his zombies from there. Last House On the Left was the high (low?)-water mark at the time in terms of graphic violence, although some mainstream movies were doing their damndest to match it: stuff like Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, or pretty much anything starring Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood were all fairly goddamned disgusting in their own right. And that’s completely ignoring what was going on in the rest of the world, especially Italy, where an entire generation of horror filmmakers were busily in the middle of churning out some of the most scummy and violent shit the world had ever seen.

 

So I find it as perplexing as anyone that a low-budget slasher flick made by first-time amateurs like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre somehow managed to combine all of these disparate elements into something which was better than just about all of the above. I’m not kidding when I call this movie the Citizen Kane of horror films. Like Kane, there are other movies I personally enjoy more. Like Kane, all of the individual gimmicks had been done before in other movies. But also like Kane, this film managed to put together nearly a highlight reel of just exactly what was possible on the cutting-edge of cinema, and shaped it into a masterpiece.

Story: five kids are on a road trip thru Texas. They run into psycho cannibals. Less than five kids emerge unscathed at the end. That’s it. That’s the whole story. It didn’t need anything more than that. TCM‘s flaws are most notable whenever characters waste time on expository dialogue. Did we really need to know all the stuff about Grandpa’s days in the slaughterhouse? Who cares? Who cares that the teenagers are cardboard cuttouts, played by green-assed noobs with no experience? Except for wheelchair-bound Franklin (and we’ll get back to him in a minute), none of these guys are supposed to be anyone specific. They are, quite deliberately, a stand-in proxy for all the young people who might come see this movie in the drive-ins and grindhouses of the day. Most horror films up to this point tended to be pretty slow-paced, with relatively low body counts, using tension and suspense to work over the audience. They laid out mountains of backstory for all the victims, on the theory that the viewer would need to know all about the character in the movie in order to care about their eventual fate. In theory, all well and good. TCM made a concious choice to abandon the old model in favor of a much more aggressive form of psychological projection. In this film, YOU are the main characters. YOU are being clubbed over the head with a hammer, hung up on a meat hook, and dismembered with a chainsaw.

 

In fact, I’ve never seen another movie whose message was so grim and yet so plausible. There are no supernatural elements in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, nothing impossible, nothing which probably hasn’t really happened in the dirty basements and blood-soaked sheds of real serial killers ’round the world. (The movie claims to be based on real events, and in fact was loosely based on the crimes of Ed Gein, although “loosely” is terming it generously.) This movie was made at the tail end of the Vietnam war, and the whole project reeks of that paranoid mindset. Young hippy-lookin’ folk are slaughtered by the military-industrial complex? This movie seems like the last furious gasp of the old “never trust anyone over 30” set. Nobody is helping these kids; the authority they run to just turns out to be in on it the whole time. And all throughout the movie, we hear radio broadcasts about various accidents and atrocities from all over the nation. Why specifically put in the broadcaster mentioning some building collapsing thousands of miles away, killing dozens of people? Because it shows the fear and contempt which this generation felt towards the entire world, that utter lack of trust in anyone to ever do the right thing.

Back to the characters. I personally think Leatherface is easily the scariest dude in the movie, and this is easily the best portrayal of that character. Why is he doing this? What made him into a cannibal killer who wears a mask of human skin? Who cares? He just Is. That’s part of the point, and part of the power. Leatherface kills strangers on sight, the first instant he sees them in his house. It’s what he does. That’s life. You happen to walk into the wrong place, you die screaming. And after you die, your remains will be defiled, your flesh will be cooked and eaten, and your bones will be strung up around the house for decoration. You will disappear without a trace from the civilized world, your friends and loved ones forever wondering and fearing what happened to you. It’s hard to imagine a more vile fate. So for me the most viscerally powerful moments are those in which the implacable killer is committing his unspeakable acts with inexplicable motivation; once we get introduced to the whole crazy family, I did feel like some of the tension drained away a little as the movie flirted with dark comedy and some vaguely-realized subtextual satire about American society. As mentioned, most of the bloodied victims are intentional stand-ins for the viewers themselves, except for Franklin.

Ah, Franklin. The guy in the wheelchair. Wasn’t he an annoying bitch? But once again, yeah, that’s the entire point. The very first time we get a look at live people in this movie, it’s Franklin rolling out of the van in order to piss into a can on the side of the highway. What? Cripples also go to the bathroom? Talk about Nouvelle Vogue filmmaking. And he anchors the teenagers, since, let’s face it, we’ve all known some asshole like this. Franklin is a whining brat, not too bright, selfish and cowardly, socially maladjusted, with a terrible sense of humor. Plus, up til this point, crippled people in movies had invariably been portrayed as either retarded sideshow freaks or secular saints whom were paragons of intellect and morality. Never before had a filmmaker had the balls to have a disabled guy who also just so happened to be a total douchebag. As grating as the character is, his interaction with the rest of the cast make everything feel much more real. Everyone’s had some friend or relative who couldn’t do something for themself, so you had to do it for them, and maybe sometimes they weren’t terribly grateful for it. It’s completely relatable, and makes the group of future-corpses feel less like a Friday the 13th-style random collection of bad actors playing “regular kids”, and more like a close-knit group of real regular kids.

I should also mention the set design, and cinematography, and editing. Not specifically say why I mention them, cuz that’s a much longer conversation, other than saying they’re really damn good. Most exceptional was the amazing sound design. The atonal anti-music playing in the background and alien, dischordant, non-representational sound effects helped set up a raw feeling of true madness, and have been endlessly copied since then. Many folks have talked about how there’s actually very little onscreen gore or violence, so I won’t belabor that point here other than to repeat it and note its accuracy. It all puts together an atmosphere in which banal terms like “fate” or “destiny” seem to have no meaning, in which shit happens just because shit happens. I’m reminded of something Richard Pryor once said, relating a conversation between him and a real convict while they were filming Stir Crazy at a real prison. Richard asks, “But why did you kill ALL the people in the house?”. The prisoner, in the most bored and apathetic tone imaginable, replies: “Because they were home”.

 

Shock Treatment (1981, directed by Jim Sharman): 1/10

WHAT THE FUCK. WHAT THE FUCK DID I JUST WATCH. PUPPY-FUCKING HELL. THIS GODDAMN MOVIE GAVE ME FUCKING TOURETTES. I WANT TO KICK THIS MOVIE IN THE CUNT. THE TOE OF MY SHOE AND THIS MOVIE’S FALLOPIAN TUBES ARE GONNA HAVE A FUCKING INTIMATE MEETING. NO, WAIT, IT DOESN’T EVEN HAVE FALLOPIAN TUBES, IT’S GOT AN UNHOLY SURGICALLY-CREATED TRANNY PUSSY. WHATEVER FUCKING GENITALS THIS MOVIE HAS, IM’MA KICK THEM. HOLY JESUS CARVING HIS BLOODY PATH OUT OF MARY’S VIRGIN COOTER, THIS WAS INDESCRIBABLY AWFUL. FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK.

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(For those of you wondering, that last line was the result of an absolutely legitimate keyboard-headbutt.)

Now I know why NOBODY EVER talks about The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s deservedly forgotten sequel. Christ almighty, this was the least entertaining movie I’ve seen in a coon’s age. (Note: “a coon’s age” is not an inherently racist statement, and it generally means “a long period of time”. But this movie is so indescribably insipid that it does invite the very worst of insults, whether they be racist, sexist, homophobic, modern, archaic, or downright blasphemous.) Most unbelievably bad movies are entertaining in their lamebrained incompetence, but not this one. No, the problem is, Shock Treatment is supposed to be funny. It’s supposed to be a campy, high-energy livewire of fun and frolic. As we all know, there’s absolutely nothing in the world more miserable than a failed comedy.

I just started to type my usual “aw hell, how do I even describe this plot?” stuff here, when I was suddenly poleaxed by a sharp pain in my temple. Not kidding. Left temple. Came right out of nowhere, the very instant I realized that I now had to recap this FUCKING MOVIE’S TAMPON-SUCKING EXCUSE FOR A DICKBITING SO-CALLED STORYLINE. Man, I’m not even meaning to type like that for comic effect. A bubbling mixture of bewilderment, contempt and pure rage is threatening to boil right out of me every time I even remember what the hell I just saw. Alright, Jingus. Breathe deep. Square-breating exercises. Count to four inhaling, count to four holding it, count to four exhaling, count to four holding it. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. It’s okay. You can do it.

Okay, so once again, our heroes are Brad and Janet. Except that this time they are very much not played by Barry Bostwick or Susan Sarandon. This time, they’re played by some TV ham ‘n egger named Cliff DeYoung and that chick from Suspiria, Jessica Harper. They’re invited onto a marriage counseling talk show, and somehow Brad gets committed into a loony bin while Janet is manipulated into being a TV star. (Because, y’know, involuntary commitment to a mental hospital is so fucking hilarious.) Believe me, I’m making it sound a LOT more coherent than the movie ever did. A few of the actors from Rocky Horrorare back: the poor bastards who were once Riff Raff, Magenta, Columbia, and the Narrator are all playing completely different people this time around. And there’s also Barry Humphries, aka Dame Edna Everage, playing the WORST goddamn comic relief character since Drop Dead Fred. All of the actors suck, without exception, horrifically mugging and screaming and convulsing throughout the entire running time.

The rest of the movie is largely just a bunch of random, unconnected song numbers. As in, it never stops for dialogue longer than about, oh, ninety seconds or so before going right into the next musical sequence. Words cannot express the squirming, tapeworm-like feeling you will have every single time the score begins to start up again after the all-too-brief reprieve. And the music SUCKS. In parts of it, you can hear the score ripping off its own previous movie’s songs. And every part it’s not ripping off, it’s so hellaciously bland and forgettable that I’m struggling to remember a single lyric from the entire fucking film. The dancing is even worse, looking like it was choreographed by a blind man and demonstrated by a paraplegic.

Admittedly, not every single problem were the filmmakers’ fault. Bostwick, Sarandon, and Tim Curry were all invited to participate but refused for different reasons. But more damning are the circumstances which led to the film’s bizarre gimmick of being entirely filmed on the set of a large TV studio. Originally, the movie was supposed to be set in a small town called Denton… Denton TEXAS, WHICH IS LITERALLY FIFTEEN MINUTES RIGHT DOWN THE GODDAMN ROAD FROM MY HOUSE, AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!

FUCK!

THAT’S NOT FUNNY, GOD!

Anyway, yeah, the film was supposed to be set in real locations, but an actor’s guild strike derailed that plan. The budget was chopped down and the production was moved into soundstages in England, the only place they could legally shoot. I know this kind of problem is unavoidable, but the movie never even tries to explain why this entire town seems to only exist inside of this television studio. And the entire thing pretty much looks like the inside of Leia’s ship from the beginning of Star Wars. Have fun staring at blinding white walls for the next ninety minutes, kids!

The film was written (Richard O’Brien) and directed (Jim Sharman) by the exact same people who made The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I am seriously trying to think of any similar example where there was such a massive drop-off in quality between an original and a sequel which were both done by the same filmmakers. Rocky V, maybe? Perhaps Blues Brothers 2000? Even those seem like poor comparisons, since I would dead-fucking-serious much rather watch both of those two films again than ever be re-subjected to the gashplastering horror which is Shock Treatment. As the kids say today, EPIC FAIL. If this movie got wiped with shit, you’d be more concerned with wiping away the movie and just leaving the poor innocent shit alone.

 

Aaaaaaaaaand we’re all outta time, folks.  See you back here next week, for more of the best of the best and the worst of the worst.