Stephen King, Takashi Miike and Patton Oswalt are among the contributors to this documentary about Tobe Hooper’s 1974 horror masterpiece
If you’re programming your own little horror film festival in the run-up to Halloween, and Tobe Hooper’s stone-cold classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre from 1974 is part of the lineup, then this would make a handy follow-up for a night’s viewing. It’s not a making-of movie, although there are snippets of insight into the production’s process; nor is it a meta-commentary at the same sprawling level of Room 237, the delirious doc about The Shining. Instead, Chain Reaction is something in between, constructed in five chapters featuring interviews with five very different, almost random-seeming interlocutors who have strong feelings about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. These are: comedian Patton Oswalt, film-makers Takashi Miike (Audition, Ichi the Killer) and Karyn Kusama (Girlfight, Jennifer’s Body), academic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, and writer Stephen King.
One may wonder why these five people are featured and not, say, any other bunch of opinionated famous movie buffs, but at least they have pretty interesting things to say. Each quilts together their own personal experience of the film with more general musings on cinema, technique, horror vo terror, and that annoying conversation stopper at every dinner party: the zeitgeist. We learn, for instance, that Takashi first saw Texas Chain Saw when he was 15, and chose it only because he couldn’t get in to see a rereleased print of City Lights by Charlie Chaplin. (He has still not seen the latter, he says.)
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