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"You can all go to hell, I'm going to Texas." The art brut thrust has darkness illuminated by dreadful flashes that unveil a crimson tableau of wired-up cadavers, "a grisly work of art." Franju's abattoir (Le sang des bêtes) is a marked olfactory presence, the inescapable foul scent picked up by a quintet of young joyriders in the midst of the "disturbing and unpredictable day" promised by the horoscope. (Paul A. Partain's pantomime of an air gun piercing through bovine skulls sets the gleeful timbre.) The terrain is a meadow lush with rot, the crumbling manse by the barbecue shanty beckons the travelers out of the clammy van and onto the meat hooks. Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) is Caliban with a butcher's soiled apron, he summarily annihilates the would-be heroic couple (William Vail, Teri McMinn) and cowers in a corner, eyes darting from behind his mask of stitched human skin. "I just can't take no pleasure in killing," drawls the head of the cannibal clan (Jim Siedow), "but there's just some things you gotta do." A ferocious redneck Theater of Cruelty, Tobe Hooper's masterpiece abounds in snuff ambience and cacophonous trauma. Claustrophobic frames and a low-angled, prowling camera contemplate every grainy detail (the spider's nest up in the attic, a dangling stopwatch speared by a nail, chicken feathers floating around the skeletal décor), heightening the appalling comedy of heartland family values devouring whatever's left of the Age of Aquarius. An indelible nightmare moving in its own cosmic cycle, a sky in which blasting suns and full moons give way to the capillary-cracked whites of Marilyn Burns' dismayed eyes. Dalí's Rainy Taxi figures in the giddy mushrooming of terror, the hillbilly's dervish roar brings back the darkness. "If I have any more fun today, I don't think I can take it!" Decades of sequels, prequels, remakes and imitations can't dilute its scabrous power. With Allen Danziger, Edwin Neal, and John Dugan.
--- Fernando F. Croce |