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DVD (17)
The picture gets to you more through its intensity than its craft, but Hooper does have a talent.
Despite the heavy doses of gore in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Tobe Hooper's pic is well-made for an exploiter of its type.
The movie is some kind of weird, off-the-wall achievement. I can't imagine why anyone would want to make a movie like this, and yet it's well-made, well-acted, and all too effective.
Best for older teens and adults only.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre doesn't try anything funny, there are no winks to the audience. And it's all the better because of it.
Artfully documentarylike and shot under conditions that produced genuinely traumatized performances, the original Massacre eschews cheap thrills and attacks the psyche.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre chopped up our expectations more than 30 years ago, and for that we will always remember - and be thankful that some experiences do stay up on the screen.
All these elements set the stage for some of the most prolonged scenes of sustained panic ever captured by cinema, as Hooper infects characters and viewers alike with the thrill of a madness from which there can be no real escape.
A cutthroat, unendingly bleak masterpiece of horror cinema.
It's a masterpiece, pure and simple..a smart young director summing up the basest instincts of his species.
Seeing this again recently has convinced me that it's quite a bit better than I initially judged.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre loses none of its intensity as the years go by.
The violence is outdated by today's standards, but the original Chainsaw still packs a punch with its rough look and disturbing overtones.
The Great American Horror Movie.
The film's intense final half achieves its unshakable effect through a combination of things aside from graphic gore.
A profoundly sensitive look at social prejudices and the toll said prejudices take on the human social organism.
An intelligent, absorbing, and deeply disturbing horror film that is nearly bloodless in its depiction of violence.
In his laughing-outlaw way, Hooper pointed a new direction for horror cinema. [2-Disc Ultimate Edition Reviewed]
Cultish trash set new low standards for brutality.
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