Average Rating: 7.7/10
Reviews Counted: 45
Fresh: 41 | Rotten: 4
Thanks to a smart script and documentary-style camerawork, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre achieves start-to-finish suspense, making it a classic in low-budget exploitation cinema.
Average Rating: N/A
Critic Reviews: 3
Fresh: 2 | Rotten: 1
Thanks to a smart script and documentary-style camerawork, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre achieves start-to-finish suspense, making it a classic in low-budget exploitation cinema.
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Average Rating: 3.4/5
User Ratings: 178,141
Tobe Hooper's influential cult classic continues the subgenre of horror films based on the life and "career" of Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein, which began with Alfred Hitchcock's own influential cult classic Psycho. When Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) hears that the Texas cemetery where her grandfather is buried has been vandalized, she gathers her wheelchair-bound brother Franklin (Paul A. Partain) and several other friends together to see if grandpa's remains are still in one piece. While in
Oct 1, 1974 Limited
Oct 13, 1993
Bryanston Pictures
All Critics (45) | Top Critics (3) | Fresh (44) | Rotten (4) | DVD (17)
The picture gets to you more through its intensity than its craft, but Hooper does have a talent.
Despite the heavy doses of gore in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Tobe Hooper's pic is well-made for an exploiter of its type.
The movie is some kind of weird, off-the-wall achievement. I can't imagine why anyone would want to make a movie like this, and yet it's well-made, well-acted, and all too effective.
Though certain aspects of the film don't hold up that well, Tobe Hooper's seminal horror remains a hugely disturbing experience.
Chainsaw-wielding Leatherface remains one of the most disturbing characters in horror.
Still a remarkable and utterly unnerving horror film to this day...
Best for older teens and adults only.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre doesn't try anything funny, there are no winks to the audience. And it's all the better because of it.
Artfully documentarylike and shot under conditions that produced genuinely traumatized performances, the original Massacre eschews cheap thrills and attacks the psyche.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre chopped up our expectations more than 30 years ago, and for that we will always remember - and be thankful that some experiences do stay up on the screen.
All these elements set the stage for some of the most prolonged scenes of sustained panic ever captured by cinema, as Hooper infects characters and viewers alike with the thrill of a madness from which there can be no real escape.
A cutthroat, unendingly bleak masterpiece of horror cinema.
It's a masterpiece, pure and simple..a smart young director summing up the basest instincts of his species.
Seeing this again recently has convinced me that it's quite a bit better than I initially judged.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre loses none of its intensity as the years go by.
The violence is outdated by today's standards, but the original Chainsaw still packs a punch with its rough look and disturbing overtones.
The Great American Horror Movie.
The film's intense final half achieves its unshakable effect through a combination of things aside from graphic gore.
A profoundly sensitive look at social prejudices and the toll said prejudices take on the human social organism.
An intelligent, absorbing, and deeply disturbing horror film that is nearly bloodless in its depiction of violence.
Super Reviewer
Super Reviewer
Topic | Last Post | Replies |
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symbolism in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre | 2 months ago | 0 |
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