Amazon.com Essentials:
This sensational, extremely influential, 1974 low-budget
horror movie directed by Tobe Hooper (Poltergeist, Lifeforce, Salem's Lot), may
be notorious for its title, but it's also a damn fine piece of
moviemaking. And it's blood-curdling scary, too. Loosely based on the
true crimes of Ed Gein (also a partial inspiration for Psycho), the
original Jeffrey Dahmer, Texas Chainsaw Massacre follows a
group of teenagers who pick up a hitchhiker and wind up in a backwoods
horror chamber where they're held captive, tortured, chopped up, and
impaled on meat hooks by a demented cannibalistic family, including a
character known as Leatherface who maniacally wields one helluva
chainsaw. The movie's powerful sense of dread is heightened by its
grainy, semi-documentary style--but it also has a wicked sense of
humor (and not that camp, self-referential variety that became so
tiresome in subsequent horror films of the '70s, '80s, and '90s). OK,
in case you couldn't tell, it's "not for everyone." But as a landmark
in the development of the horror/slasher genre, it ranks with Psycho, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm
Street. --Jim Emerson
