Andrew Worsdale Movies of the week
What’s scarier: something growing inside you or a chainsaw-wielding monster around the corner wanting to cut you to bits?
One of the scariest movies of all time has to be Alien, Ridley Scott’s 1979 flick that I dumped out of school for – to see John Hurt having a horrible thing jump out of his stomach.
Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street had a mad, already dead slasher going after teenagers in their dreams, and it was probably the bloodiest (literally) scary movie I’ve ever seen; apart from, maybe, John Carpenter’s Halloween, where the director played a psycho game as his anti-hero, Michael Myers, decimated a bunch of teenagers who were having sex. The Friday the 13th movies continued the genre – some kind of weird Freudian “let’s kill `em before they come” spectacle, equating sexual guilt with murder.
What makes people cry or scream during a movie? Probably the music. What made Jaws one of the scariest pictures of all time was John Williams’s “a shark is going to get you” score. The point is, either sexual promiscuity or damn foolishness is going to get you killed in the movies, or in real life, for that matter.
This week sees the release of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 movie, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which until now has been banned in South Africa. As a young movie geek I managed to get a video copy and watched it with Debbie Does Dallas. The mixture of sex and violence got all us teenagers excited.
Texas is more a piece of artifice than a movie – and many viewers will be taken aback by its tacky Seventies pretensions. Nonetheless, it should be relished. The slim narrative involves a group of teenagers who stumble across a psychopathic family on a remote farm. The family has been retrenched from an abattoir and continues killing meat – humans in place of cattle.
The woman-in-jeopardy theme is taken as far as it can go – apart from the fact that the chicks never take off their hot pants. But what makes the film truly scary is that there are no artificial music plugs or sleazy atmospheric shots to get you terrified. It is almost like an amateur home movie – it becomes really terrifying because there are few tricks. It’s akin to viewing Kosovo atrocities on CNN, just stuck in the Seventies.
Although Texas is appallingly shot and amateurish, this movie from two decades ago manages to chill one’s spine with its sheer sense of voyeuristic pleasure in seeing people getting knocked off.
Tobe Hooper made a sequel in 1986 which had Dennis Hopper as a psychotic ex-Texas ranger trying to bring the cannibalistic family to justice. But the original is far more claustrophobic and pernicious – a masterpiece, although it’s complete crap. Hooper also made some junk in South Africa in 1994 – The Mangler, about a possessed laundry press which eats up adolescent girls. It was stodgy, ill-developed and, yes, crap.
Other killer/thriller movies include such titles as Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, which featured a former chat show host who turned into a “man-eating Piranha-woman”. Showing a similar vein of humour in the killing stakes is Bride of Chucky, the fourth in the Child’s Play series, which involves a killer doll possessed by the spirit of a psychopath.
In the latest succession Jennifer Tilly plays Tiffany, the girlfriend of Chucky when he was human. She finds the doll, lovingly stitches him together and brings him to life. Chucky kills Tiffany and brings her back to life as an anatomically perfect female doll. The two try to find a way to turn back into humans.
It’s a witty and intelligently nasty picture, and Hong Kong director Ronny Yu brings a lot of celluloid kinetic verve to the film, with moments of campy hilarity among the horror.
Both The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Bride of Chucky are “crap” movies, but as guilty pleasures for a cinephile they are hard to beat.
See Texas for the hot pants and the scariness – although we’ve since seen such horrifying cinematic events as The Silence of the Lambs, so you might be inured to it all. Both movies, in different ways, offer a campy and ironic view of how we get a thrill, and even a laugh, out of seeing people getting “slagged” on screen.
They are by no means classics, but for that Sunday afternoon “let’s rent a video” feeling on the big screen, you could do worse. Far worse.