THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974)

Man…This. Wow. I'd been bugging my dad for what seems like FOREVER to let me watch this. His response was always something like "no, you're not ready for this." I mean, I've seen a lot of stuff, right? I figured nothing could be as disgusting as DEMONS, or as scary as SUSPIRIA or something, so how bad could this be? This gets written up in all of the horror movie books I have, and there are reviews all over the internet about it, so it's not like anything in it could be that surprising, right? So I kept going to dad with my arguments. First, it's not supposed to be that violent. There's only five kids in this, and someone always has to get away, so there could ONLY be like 4 victims, right? And everything I had read said that there's almost no blood in it. Everything's all implied. So there's that. Second, it might have been extreme for when it was made, but that was GENERATIONS ago! The whole "kids getting picked off one-by-one by toothless yokels" thing has been done to death by now (no pun intended!).

So he finally gave up.

Holy crap, man. This was disturbing. First off, it's best to go into the movie not knowing anything about it, so I'm not going to spoil any of the plot details, but if you've ever, I don't know, been on the internet, you probably already know all about how the story plays out. But it's not really about what the story is (because there's not a lot of it to go around), it's how it does what it does. And it does what it does by filling every little scene with tension. This is probably the most tense movie I've ever seen. Everything keeps your nerves on edge. Whether it's people screaming, or Leatherface squealing, or Franklin whining on and on ("I'm comin' with ya, Sally! Hold on, I'm comin' with ya!") or the *really* disturbing soundtrack, everything is keyed up to 11. Most horror movies have a big scare every so often, and then things calm down a bit. Not this, buddy! This is constantly uncomfortable, and when the big scares come, we don't go back to normal, we just go back to being uncomfortable. And then it ends, and it's like someone pulled a chair out from under you. After it was over, I barely talked for a good half hour, and if you know me, you know that NOTHING can get me to stop talking. I think Dad thought I might have to go to the emergency room or something!

Anyway, this is a movie that can traumatize you if you're not careful. It's probably one of the best movies out there, just because it does what it sets out to do really well, but it's hard for me to recommend it because of how well it does what it does. You've really got to prepare for it, like a marathon or something.