I think I mentioned this once a long time ago, but Tobe Hooper’s THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE is one of my favorite movies, and one of the great cinematic obsessions of my life. So I’m happy to say that the recent documentary about the movie, CHAIN REACTIONS, is a good one.
It’s not about the making of the movie. For that I recommend Brad Shellady’s THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: A FAMILY PORTRAIT (1988), which is an oral history through interviews with the actors who played the family members. This one is more of a video essay, speaking to five people who had nothing to do with the movie – a comedian, two filmmakers, a critic and a novelist. (Specifically it’s Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King and Karyn Kusama.) I think they have some good insights, but what made this really work for me is the specific ways director Alexandre O. Philippe (MEMORY: THE ORIGINS OF ALIEN, LYNCH/OZ) visually weaves together the interviews with different experiences of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and horror films as a whole, while avoiding pretty much all of the annoying cliches of modern fan documentaries. (read the rest of this shit…)
