Texas Chainsaw Never Dies

Very rare publicity images and lobby cards from the granddaddy of all modern horror films.

Reproduced in Creepy Images magazine, these gems remind us why the original is not to be trifled with.

I recently caught the trailer for the new Texas Chainsaw 3-D and I wasn't impressed at all. It's such an obvious grab for 3-D cash and insults the original.

I'm not totally against intelligently expanding on the Texas mythology, but most Texas films just re-make the original or totally boob up the original's tone. I'm looking at you, Texas 2, you cunt!

"Evil wears many faces"! Yes, and it's called greed.

Creepy Images is a superb digest-sized magazine that reproduces ultra-rare lobby cards and posters from around the world.

Go to: www.creepy-images.com

A Mother of a Day

I'm out of the loop when people describe Charles Kaufman's Mother's Day ('80) as "great cheese". It's a patronizing, back-handed compliment that demonstrates a lack of appreciation for the film's brilliance.

I think it's one of the greatest horror films ever made, and a truly worthy successor to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that isn't satisfied duplicating its inspiration's assets. Instead, it adds a consumerist subtext while adhering to and bending genre conventions at unexpected moments.

Written by Charles Kaufman (Lloyd's much more talented brother) and Warren Leight, who went on to write and produce Law and Order - Criminal Intent, it is an extremely well made, tightly scripted film that moves like a rocket, presents a trio of female characters who feel very real, nails its black humor every time, and lathes on the violence and gore.

Its contemporaries can't hold a candle to it.

Yet it was sold and reviewed like it was throw-away batshit.

Its writing is its strength. The first fifteen minutes, in which the three heroines are introduced, is a textbook example of economic scripting.



With deft, broad, intelligent strokes, Kaufman and Leight introduce us to three friends whose lives could not be more dissimilar.

Each year, however, their differences equalize when they come together for a weekend getaway that is like a female version of the Deliverance set-up.

The horror begins when the women are attacked in their sleeping bags...

... by two playful, semi-retarded, permanent adolescents (played with frightening realism by Frederick Coffin and Michael McCleery).


The boys, who are dominated by a neurotic, psychotic, paranoid Mother (Rose Ross), drag the girls to their house in the woods. Encouraged by Mother...

... they torture and sexually assault the girls until they get bored. They work that off by punching each other out in the yard and stabbing human effigies. One of the girls takes this opportunity to escape and seek help.

Cheesy?

Are you fucking kidding! Mother's Day is kind of like the party prankster who goes too far.

Instead of blowing up a condom and stretching it over his head, he throws gasoline over the shy girl and sets her on fire.

The difference is, this prankster manages to put the fire out just in time. This balance of the real with the outrageous is what makes Mother's Day such a fine piece of exploitation.

The clutter of of the set design is inspired by Texas Chainsaw, but the substance is pure pop culture.

The two sons have been raised as unthinking, lustful thugs in a house that resembles a garish museum of late 20thy century consumerism. They are woken each morning by a Big Bird clock, brush their teeth with Cheez Whiz, and argue over the merits of disco and punk.

The writers, in a rare feat, get to have it their cake and eat it, too. They deliver very dark, disturbing "comedy", while lathering on the Grand Guignol.




Technically, especially for a low budget film, Mother's Day is a revelation. Joseph Mangine, who shot Squirm ('76), the X-rated Captain Lust ('77), Alone in the Dark ('82), and Charles Band's brilliant X-rated Cinderella ('77), does a knock-up job with the film's lighting and swift camera work.

The scenes of the house in the woods bloom with a searing brightness that one-ups James Lemmo's impressive nighttime photography of Joe Giannone's Madman ('82). The interiors are extra-bright like toy commercials, and the hand-held camera work is perfectly measured and never vomit-inducing. The original music, mostly synth, by Phil Gallo and Clem Vicari Jr., perfectly compliments the film's many tonal shifts.

The only questionable step is the final shot of the earless "Queenie" springing out from behind a bush to claim the lives of the survivors.

It's not terrible, but it feels like an afterthought in a film that felt so intelligently structured.

The infamous "Shirley Temple" sequence, in which the two brain-damaged sons play a disturbing rape game with one of the girls, is very strong stuff.

Kaufman plays it smartly because he knows exactly when to push a scene and when to pull it back. His direction is consistently inventive and clear-headed throughout.

Mother's Day is great horror in my book. The only "cheese" I saw was the Cheez Whiz that was being used as toothpaste by the film's village idiots.

This is also one of the very few horror films in which the female characters are sensitively portrayed and feel authentic in context.

The death of one of the women has a seriously tragic edge.

If any film needs a serious re-consideration, this is it.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2009: Friday The 13th

Director Marcus Nispel, producer Michael Bay, director of photography Daniel Pearl, and composer Steve Jablonsky, the team behind the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake...

...have reassembled for the latest (and third) installment in Platinum Dunes' The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise.

For reasons unknown, the words "chainsaw" and "massacre" have been eliminated from the title of this one. It's simply called

How this differs marginally from the previous entries is that the villain's name is "Jason" (a name that does ring a bell)...

and the setting is a place called "Camp Crystal Lake". That also rings a bell with me, though it looked unfamiliar.

After two gory prologues...

a new bunch of victims, who are the direct clones of the victims from the Texas remake (see below), are introduced.


They're on the way to spend a weekend at the house of a an arrogant, mean-spirited blond guy who looks a lot like Michael Bay when he was younger.

As producer, Bay may have signed off on this guy's good looks, but I can't fathom why he'd sign off on the guy's personality; what if people starting confusing him? I'm going to put it down to Mr. Bay being a good sport. He's been busy making Transfromers 2 - Rise of the Machines, anyway, so I don't imagine he's had much time to micromanage how his likeness is being represented out there in filmland.

Anyway, these folks meet a non-blond guy who's looking for his sister; she was one of the girls we saw in the gory prologue. The Bay look-alike takes an immediate dislike to this guy because his girlfriend shows him some kindness.

Eventually, the group arrives at the Bay lookalike's vacation house, paralleling the arrival of the Marilyn Burns-led group at the house her relative owned in the first and greatest Texas Chainsaw ('74). The main differences between the houses are the furnishings -- one used human bones, the other used expensive hardwoods and mountains of cash.

As in the original Texas and the first remake (Nispel's), the groups split off. One couple goes searching for the old holiday camp, mirroring Kirk and Pam's search for fuel in the original. The remains of the group decide to hang around the house, just as Sally and Franklin opted to stay behind in the van while everybody else was being readied for slaughter.

In the original Texas, Kirk and Pam discover an old generator chugging and popping away in a scary old shed, raising their hopes of finding fuel. Well, in this Texas installment, curiously titled Friday the 13th, there is also a generator that chugs and pops and is surrounded by the same type of production design -- abandoned machinery, some canoes, assorted bric-a-brac, and the obligatory, dusty dolls.

As expected, you get clobbered for being a sticky beak in these movies, so when the first clobbering comes, you're not terribly surprised. If this were a Platinum Dunes remake of Merchant-Ivory's Heat and Dust, you would be.


The villain of this Chainsaw entry does not, in fact, carry a chainsaw. He wears a hockey mask, but he doesn't play hockey, either. What he does and does well, however, is protect his precious piece of turf. He's more territorial than a haunted house of cats. Everybody who stumbles onto his turf, which includes a large lake, gets chopped and viciously gored. Even a topless water skier is not safe from this nutter's passive/aggressive territorialism. In a nifty sequence, the driver of the boat pulling the skier is shot through the head with an arrow. The skier is then struck by the out of control boat. As she swims to shore to get a spot of first aid, our villain appears.

As you can see, he's not carrying a first aid kid.

When said skier manages to swim to a relatively safe haven, she gets skewered through the head instead of much-needed medical assistance.

Films like this teach us not to expect favors from anybody.

Although the villain of this Chainsaw re-do doesn't have a chainsaw collection, he does reside in the same, familiar, subterranean den that Leatherface favored in Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 ('86), which was cleverly hidden beneath an old theme park.

In this outing, it's hidden beneath an old Summer camp.

When this den of torture and captivity was introduced, my vague memories of another place called Camp Crystal Lake totally faded because I knew instinctively that there were no underground chambers there. That place barely passed the building codes for a bare-bones Summer camp, let alone an underground labyrinth!

Leatherfaces old and new have always been drawn to vile, subterranean refuges that remind them of their original home, an old house that was littered with trash and bones, body parts, skulls, and assorted balls and chains. It even had a swing outside that cameras could dolly under.

Platinum Dunes, the company director Michael Bay formed to produce remakes of iconic horror pics such as The Amityville Horror, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Friday the 13th, recently announced that there would be no more Chainsaw pics after the first two.

They should have been more precise and said: "...no more Chainsaw pics with the Chainsaw branding."

Tobe Hooper's '73 original is one of my favorite horror pics of all time.

I am also a fan of Marcus Nispel's remake, and enjoyed it because it's a different beast altogether.

Although it outstays its welcome by a half hour and discards the entire dinner table scene, it was unrepentantly brutal and gaudy, and I appreciated its embrace of the grotesque and the addition of R. Lee Ermey's perverted Sheriff Hoyt character.


The wheelchair-ridden, legless Old Monty, played with gleeful deviance by Terrence Evans, really rocked my boat, too.

Deep down, I celebrated a Hollywood film that was so damn filthy.

Friday The 13th is not as dark as Nispel's first Texas attempt...

... and Daniel Pearl's photography is not quite as stylized. Still, the night exteriors are gorgeously lit (think the beautiful night photography of Joe Giannone's Madman, but with more money)...

...and the stalking sequences are handsomely staged.

One kill involving ax fodder suspended in a sack above a roaring fire felt like an echo of a very similar kill in Jack Ketchum's monumental Off Season (Ballantine Books, 80; Leisure Books, 2006).

The sexual deviance is pulled back here to jokes involving drinking female urine and a silly scene in which one of the ax fodders licks the paper vagina of a centerfold.

Unlike the recent My Bloody Valentine remake, the pacing is swift and the performances are perfectly adequate.

No explanation is offered as to the fate of the person who beheaded Jason's mother, but one can assume that Jason made his feelings known to her.

Replicating the stunning epilog of the original Friday The 13th was never going to be easy. Here, Nispel hardly even tries. Jason's leap from the lake is positively pathetic.

Just prior to this, however, we get a little horror lyricism as the killer's hockey mask floats to the bottom of the lake.

Clearly, the team behind Friday The 13th love their Texas Chainsaw Massacre a bit too much.

Don't we all?