Alright Montreal, now is the time to support your local film scene. With so many of our best video stores and cinemas closing down, we need to support events like this. Grindhouse Wednesdays returns Tonight, April 11 2012 with the genre defining classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
When someone hears the title The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, they might just pass it off as just another inane slasher flick, but in fact Texas is much more; it’s a relentlessly agonizing, bleak masterpiece of horror cinema. Texas isn’t merely interested in scaring its audience; it’s an intelligent and visceral experience which examines the darker impulses found in people, a movie where unspeakably horrific acts take place mostly outside of the frame.
Shot on a tiny budget of $83,000, director Tobe Hooper’s stylish debut achieves maximum effect through a combination of Daniel Pearl’s appropriately gritty cinematography, shrieking sound design, and an unnerving concrète score that will ring in your ears long after the end credits role. The shaky, eerie and at times documentary-style camerawork, practical effects, and the age-old trick of suggestion help lend the film an alarming and utterly believable quality. Hooper’s film is implicit, rather than graphic, but Hooper’s directorial style will have you walking away thinking it was bloodier and gorier than it actually is.
The film’s 16mm low-budget look and Bob Burns’ surreal sets and props just add to the realism, creating the illusion of a documentary gone wrong. Of course the story is not true, but it was however inspired by real-life Wisconsin farmer Ed Gein, a grave robber, who garnered widespread notoriety after authorities discovered he had exhumed corpses from local graveyards and fashioned trophies and keepsakes from their bones and skin. His real-life case influenced the creation of several fictional serial killers, including Hitchcock’s Norman Bates in Psycho and Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre remains to this day a motion picture of raw, uncompromising intensity, a punishing assault on the senses via extended scenes of absolute sustained frenzy ever captured on celluloid. Marilyn Burns’ doomed screams will forever be etched in your memory as will the horror icon it produced, the raging chainsaw wielding lunatic Leatherface. Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre undoubtedly ranks as one of the best horror flicks of all time, and also boasts one of the most unforgettable abrupt endings ever.
– Ricky D
So come get your mid-week fix with the rest of Montreal’s exploitation nation at The Rialto. Returning to emcee will be the lovely Robby Hoffman, serving up wise-cracking insights into the human condition, and local psychedelic rock outfit The Breezes ( http://www.thebreezes.ca/ ) storm the stage right after the film!
7:30pm – Doors open, various short films.
8pm – Robby Hoffman’s half-hour of power comedy set.
8:30pm – Feature film… THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE
10pm – Live band… The Breezes
Tickets will be $8 in advance @ Cruella 63 Mont-Royal E & @ Head & Hands 5833 Sherbrooke West.
A FUND-RAISER FOR HEAD & HANDS. www.headandhands.ca
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