Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Tobe Hooper
• Written by Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper
• Starring
  • Marilyn Burns
  • Allen Danziger
  • Paul A. Partain
  • Jim Siedow
  • Gunnar Hansen
• Produced by Tobe Hooper and Lou Peraino

To my knowledge, no other movie (certainly no other horror movie) bears as high a ratio of name recognition to actual audience. I mean, everyone knows the title, including huge populations who associate it with extremely gory horror and have no intention ever of seeing it. Say what you will about Tobe Hooper, but he managed to create not just a movie, but a pop-cultural meme that has entered the mainstream almost divorced from the film itself.

I’m guessing that, with that kind of cultural exposure, most viewers find themselves surprised upon first seeing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, especially if they’ve seen much in the way of gore in the three decades since (including the ’80s slasher glut, which could probably claim Chainsaw as their grandparent as much as they can claim Carpenter’s Halloween as their parent). Despite gorehound devotion, this isn’t a movie about gore. It is, however, a movie with a brazenly forward attitude about both violence and cruelty, and that, coupled with its feel of transgressive “outsider art,” is what has guaranteed it a place in the splatter canon.

Okay, but it’s not like every NEA grant goes for something like this.

The opening cements that focus on that transgressiveness, presenting us with a tableau of disinterred corpses strung up as some bizarre kind of cadaverous sculpture in the graveyard. Radio broadcasts inform us of a spate of graverobbings which have the rural Texas community in an uproar. When a movie opens with a broken taboo so bold, you can only assume that later developments will push the envelope even further.

Were it not for that opening scene, mind you, one might find nothing more horrifying in the first half of the movie than a steady stream of mediocre country music. Our protagonists, such as they are, are five twenty-somethings travelling in a van. Chief among them, for different reasons, are paraplegic Franklin (Paul A. Partain) and his sister Sally (Marilyn Burns), plus Sally’s boyfriend and another couple. There’s reason that I’m breaking with convention and ignoring the character names for the other three; it’s that they really don’t emerge as characters, not even as stereotypes. They’re placeholder actors wearing bad ’70s fashions until their turn to die a violent death comes. (Whoops, hope that doesn’t give away too much too early in the game.) Franklin is by far the most fully developed character of the lot, a not-too-bright fellow (though certainly not especially stupid compared to his compatriots) who keenly feels the difference between himself and his more able-bodied travelling companions. Sally, on the other hand, is as personality-free as the rest of the vanload, and merits by-name recognition only by virtue of screentime.

The twenty-somethings’ excuse for being in rural Texas is a) to check the integrity of Franklin’s and Sally’s grandfather’s grave in the compromised cemetery, and b) to take a side trip to grandpa’s house, now abandoned and fallen into disrepair. Between the two sites (which are themselves pretty peaceful), they have two ominous encounters:

“Hey, don’t you know that a dull knife is actually more dangerous?”

The first is with a hitchhiker (Edwin Neal), who seems only slightly addled but harmless as he talks about his grandfather’s days working in the local slaughterhouse and takes pictures of the vanriders. It’s only when he uses Franklin’ pocketknife to slice open his own palm, then slashes his own straight-razor across Franklin’s forearm, that the kids upgrade his status from “harmless loony” to “dangerous nutbag” and kick him out of the van.

The second encounter and plot point comes when the pull into a flyspecked gas station and are informed by the station owner (Jim Siedow) that their tanks are empty until later that night or tomorrow morning. Faced with either backtracking to the last gas station or going just a little bit further to Grandpa’s house, they choose the latter.

As I said, the first half is almost criminally slow; after the palm-cutting bit, the only thing that qualifies as “disturbing” for the next little while is an odd fetish-like bundle of bones and feathers on the ground floor of Grandpa’s house. Ominous, yes; visually compelling,yes; exciting, no. Modern viewers, used to thrill-a-minute chases in their slasher flicks, might find themselves glazing over complacently as two of our protagonists go down to the nearby swimming hole for a dip and find it dry; they then notice the sound of a generator coming from the picturesque white house on the other side of the trees, and wander over to ask to buy some gas…

…And when the guy stumbles into the house looking for someone, Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) appears and crushes his skull with a mallet. Welcome to a horror movie after all.

Franklin. The prince of the bunch.

In fact, that first killing is almost a throwaway, being so understated and un-sensationalized that it functions more as a setup for the next death than as a horrific moment in and of itself. When the female half of the pair wanders into the house herself to find her beau, she stumbles into a room decorated with sculptures and mobiles constructed of human and animal bones, feathers, and other unsavory items. Here, then, is the emphasis of the horror — not on simple killing (which, let’s be honest, drive-in audiences had already seen enough of in their lives to be numb to), but on the transgressive characters of the killers and the perversity with which they relish their tasks. It’s only after the girl (all right, I guess I’d better start assigning the names to these placeholder characters — she’s Pam (Terry McMinn), and her boyfriend is Kirk (William Vail)) reacts in panic to the decor that Leatherface shows up, drags her into the other room, hangs her on a meathook, and fires up — a chainsaw! (Oh, come on, you must have seen that coming, at least.)

In predictable fashion, another member of the gang comes looking for the missing twosome at sundown. (This one is Jerry (Allen Danziger), and his sole distinguishing characteristic is that he looks like John Denver with a perm.) Wander to the house, wander inside, discover Pam still barely alive in a chest freezer, get a mallet to the head courtesy of Leatherface.

When Sally finally starts pushing Franklin’s wheelchair through the dark forest looking for everyone else, they’re met halfway by Leatherface and his favorite hardware implement. (Gosh, that was considerate of him, wasn’t it?) Infortunately, the mostly-immobile Franklin is the most obvious target, and ends up with a chainsaw through his abdomen. (This, I should note, is the first actual casualty caused by a chainsaw, despite the title; Kirk, on the receiving end earlier, was already dead when Leatherface fired ol’ Betsy up.) It’s not that Franklin was a terribly likeable character, but he was at least a character; more time had been spent on setting up his personality than on the other four combined, so it seems a poor return on investment to off him so early and leave no one but no-dimensional Sally to run screaming from Leatherface.

“Whoa — didn’t I pick up some two-cycle at Walmart yesterday?”

And run screaming she does — into the white house (oops), through the do-it-yourself abbatoir, upstairs to meet almost mummified Grandpa (John Dugan) and wholly mummified Grandma, through a second-story window, back through the woods… Rarely does she let two seconds go by without another whiny shriek, which is not only annoying, but a poor survival instinct to boot. Hint: The woods are dark. Find a bush to hide behind and shut up.

Her travels take her back to the gas station, but naturally, the owner turns out to be part of the clan. In fact, he, Leatherface, and the Hitchhiker are apparently brothers; at the very least, they share the same grandfather and the same sociopathic gene. Sally ends up an unwelcome dinner guest, though mercifully not the main course.

The dinner table scene best demonstrates, I think, the facet of the movie that (aside from the cachet of the title)has made it memorable for three weeks. The chainsaw clan isn’t sadistic, at least not to the overwhelming degree that would singlehandedly explain their behavior and appetites; they’ve got a definite cruel streak, which manifests itself most strongly in station owner/cook, the only one of them who could “pass” for sane in broader society. At the other end, though, is Leatherface, who is so unsocialized (he communicates in nothing but grunts and pigsqueals) and dehumanized (as symbolized by his mask of skin) and sociopathic that one can scarcely blame him or label him a real villain. The whole clan is, if not innocent, so congenitally sociopathic as to be entirely beyond the level of moral agency that could earn them the judgment of consciously “evil.” Not unlike Michael Meyers as depicted in the first Halloween film, Leatherface is more an impersonal force of nature than a human agent of cruelty.

“I am SO tired of this Atkins Diet!”

That having been said, a memorable portrayal of inhuman evil alone does not a great movie make. The visuals are also impressive in (paradoxically) their subtleness, setting up surprisingly well-composed shots which don’t call attention to their craft. But neither of those strengths can entirely cover for the paper-thin characterizations, the amorphous sense of pacing and structure, and the ending which speaks more of desperation than directorial vision. One might say that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is best considered as a static portrait of perverse sociopathic violence, rather than as a narrative tale which fulfills the functions of story.

(Whoa. I’m sure that’s not the most pretentious paragraph ever written about a chainsaw-wielding maniac, but it certainly overloads the old bullshit-o-meter, doesn’t it?)

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 4 (only one of which was by chainsaw — and they call that a “massacre”?)
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • John Larroquette (the uncredited narrator) played Klingon crewmember “Maltz” in Star Trek 3