Groovy Van. The bloodstains are a nice touch.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Franklin: If I have any more fun today, I don’t think I’m gonna be able to take it!

Tobe Hooper’s second feature-length film is full of bad decisions, and for a movie named The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, it’s odd that the lovable Leatherface kills only one person with a chain saw.

The film’s story involves a young woman and her brother who travel with their three friends to a cemetery in Texas to identify the vandalized remains of a family member.

They decide to search for their relative’s family estate in the country but eventually run into Leatherface and his family of killer rednecks.

When I was a kid, I heard rumors about a scary, bloody movie in which tons of people were murdered with a chain saw.

Years later, I realized the rumors were untrue, and most of the meatheads spreading the lies were children who had not watched the movie.

Compared to most horror films, Chain Saw is not a bloody movie. It may be more terrifying than any film in history, but its horror doesn’t rely on cheap thrills or gory carnage.

It had a tiny budget, around $140,000, but it’s hard to tell if you watch it in HD. When I was in high school, I watched it on VHS, and it was bleak and grainy.

I thought the faded colors were merely the marks of a low-budget film made in the early ’70s. I loved the movie when I watched it on videotape, but I was shocked by the remastered version on DVD.

In the remastered cut of the film, the sprawling countryside of Central Texas is bright and beautiful. The colors are crisp, the sun is intense and impressive, and the imagery draws you in. The camerawork and editing are not low budget at all. They’re brilliant.

Although the actors weren’t well known at the time of the film’s release, they aren’t too bad. They’re talented and believable performers, but their characters make incredibly stupid decisions throughout the film.

This includes picking up a disgusting hitchhiker, letting the hitchhiker borrow a pocketknife, reading horoscopes from American Astrology, and wondering into an isolated home that Ed Gein would be proud of.

I don’t think it’s a slasher film, but it popularized the notion that young adults enjoy walking into dark places and dilapidated homes. It certainly influenced the dumb teenager craze of the ’80s and ’90s.

The jarring sound effects and grisly images propel you into a twisted world that makes you cringe. It’s horror at its finest, and I don’t recommend viewing it with young children or the grandparents.

Unless, of course, your family consists of cannibalistic bumkins who sell human barbecue. If that’s the case, they’ll really dig it.