Marco Castellini
•A group of young people, on board a van, go to their old family home to check the grave of their grandfather because, in the cemetery of the same area, acts of vandalism had occurred. The young people do not know that it is their crazy neighbors who are the 'grave robbers'! One after the other, the young people are horribly killed, all except one, Sally, who is captured and kept prisoner by the family of psychopaths, a group of unbalanced people devoted to cannibalism: the older brother, the younger brother nicknamed 'Leatherface' (a giant retard who wears masks made of human skin), and the grandfather, an ex-butcher forced by age into a wheelchair... The debut film of young director Tobe Hooper demonstrates all of his talent and, paradoxically, remains his best work as an author. The plot is declared from the beginning of the film by an impersonal journalistic text, the opening sequence is immediately of great impact and the visual style is stark, as if the images already communicated the cruelty of the tragedy that will be shown soon. A film of sheer violence, with genuinely disturbing sequences that delighted horror fans and 'launched' the character of Leather Face (Face of Skin), making him a true icon of modern genre cinema. But what makes this film a cornerstone of horror cinema is definitely the hallucinatory atmosphere that permeates every sequence, everything seems like a very realistic long nightmare, also thanks to the good acting of the young leading actors. The pace is frenetic and the direction very effective, to the point of succeeding in the intention of instilling unease in the viewer even through shots of apparently innocuous objects. One clarification should be made: it would be wrong to think of 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre' as a splatter film: certainly violence is not lacking, as are some 'strong' scenes, but Hooper has chosen to dose everything, not to 'exaggerate', insisting rather on small details (the 'organic' decor of the house, for example) that manage to give a sense of the macabre and horror much more than many excessive and gruesome sequences, thus giving the film a greater sense of 'attention to reality' and therefore even greater anguish and disturbance. An absolutely must-see film.
Comments