cricketbat on IMDb — Despite its reputation, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is surprisingly tame. There’s no sex, no nudity, no F-words, and most of the violence takes place off screen. Even the cannibalism is merely implied instead of shown. But this movie is also pretty slow. They drag out almost every scene to pad the run time and still barely reach 83 minutes. However, when the engine finally gets running, there’s no denying that this is a creepy, creepy movie.
Ifsoboy567 on IMDb — What a classic movie! What a horrible movie! The sound of the chainsaw. Yeah! The sound of violence!!! It’s one of my favorite horror movies! You must watch this movie if you are an avid horror lover.
Dar Star on IMDb — I can appreciate this being a groundbreaking film to introduce lots of slasher film concepts to follow, but it doesn’t make it a great film. No character development at all. The acting is horrendous. And the scares are all the same basically. For a real horror classic The Shining is light years better. Still I rate it a 6 for its pioneering of a new genre.
bignando-59452 on IMDb — This movie was so scary and creepy when I first saw it as a teenage in the 80’s, and it has retained most of its power and impact today. There was nothing even close to this weird back then and few have come close since. The low budget adds tremendously to th sleaze and creepiness. very few movies have ever achieved it’s pure lunacy. It’s great to watch again every once in a while.
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Movie Trailer
In Depth Review and Summary
Liam — Franklin sucks, but this movie doesn’t. At least, I think it doesn’t. Its not an excellent movie, but I’ve seen worse. If you like horror, it is a must watch. If you don’t, avoid this one. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is an exhausting, upsetting, and disturbing watch.
THE POSITIVES The horror is really good. The movie was made by a couple people in 1974 on a budget of less than $200,000. Due to this, the movie feels very grimy and gross. The camera and audio quality is bad (even by 1974 standards), there is hardly any blood, no sex, and almost nothing happens for over half the movie. But because of this, it feels real. The movie even leans into this, claiming to be based on a true story (in reality, it wasn’t though. It IS loosely based off of Ed Gein, but emphasis on the ‘loosely’). It just feels like a couple of friends took a trip into the empty Texas environment and stumbled upon a real life nightmare. I won’t spoil any scenes, but there are some specific parts later in the movie that made me want to watch something funny, or maybe just take a shower. All this makes the movie pretty terrifying, so it did the one job a horror movie needs to do. If you are reading this, then you have definitely seen the Leatherface mask. There are tons of different iterations of it, some really good masks (2003), and some really, REALLY bad ones (Next Generation). But I think the original is my favorite. It is very offputting, and again, real looking. It just looks like someone took a couple of real human faces, sliced ’em into a couple of pieces, and then stitched them together. There are also some things that are revealed about Leatherface that I think are really cool if you haven’t been spoiled already.
THE NEGATIVES Many of the things I mentioned in the positives section are good, but only kind of. As I mentioned before, the camera and audio quality is really bad. I cvan pass it off because of the setting this movie was made in, but some people may not be able to. This movie is not suited to rewatches. All the factors I mentioned that make The Texas Chain Saw Massacre a scary watch, do not make the movie any fun. For being 1hr 23min, it feels like 2 hours. It is so exhausting, especially the third act, to just keep your focus on the movie. The third act is just the main character running, hiding, crying, and screaming, over and over and over again.
Game-Nest 