The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) KILL COUNT

[Music] welcome to the killcam where we tally up the victims in all our favorite horror movies I'm James agent Issa and today we're finally looking at the Texas Chainsaw Massacre released in 1974 the Texas Chainsaw Massacre has become the most requested franchise on this channel and it's not hard to see why the original film is one of the most influential horror movies of all time and came out before most of the other landmark films of the genre including Halloween and just barely black Christmas now as amazing as the original Chainsaw Massacre is in fact Chelsea sights it as her favorite horror movie I'm not sure if everyone who requested this franchise understands just how messed up again and I don't only mean in terms of quality even though plenty of these movies are straight-up stinkers Texas Chainsaw is continuity is severely convoluted rivaled only by the clusterfuck that is the Halloween franchise get this the original has three sequels although parts three and four have completely different characters and storylines the 2003 reboot with Jessica Biel was followed by a 2006 prequel the beginning 2013's Texas Chainsaw 3d is a direct sequel to the original 74 film and finally 2018 s Leatherface is a prequel to the original that maintains continuity with the 2013 3d film did you get all that if not don't worry there will be plenty of time for review as we spend the next two months with this series during which you'll see a bunch of different leather faces a whole bunch of people jumping through windows and some familiar a-list actors along the way but before all that craziness we had the original co-written and directed by tobe Hooper the Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a certain reputation that it honestly doesn't deserve because I'm sure when you hear the name you think stereotypical super bloody slasher right this movie is not that not at all it's decidedly tame when it comes to gore and to be honest it's more of an arthouse film than a Friday of the 13th type slasher in fact this movie is the subject of so many academic and analytical reviews that Chelsea devoted an entire episode of the dead meat podcast to it earlier this week do yourself a favor and check it out since the kill count only provides jokes and some behind the scenes info the podcast is where you'll get the fancy intellectual stuff going into this movie for the first time you should probably set your expectations according the first half is surprisingly slow-paced focusing mostly on setting the tone and relishing in Daniel Pearl's gorgeous cinematography when things finally explode in the final act it's not a hack-and-slash kill fest but rather a soul-crushing nightmare of depravity at the hands of this franchise's bedrock the sadistic Sawyer family for those of you unfamiliar with this franchise you may be surprised to learn that it revolves around a family of cannibals during the series will see the Sawyer's go through half a dozen iterations always changing family members and often changing their name but the one consistent element of these movies hand the boy that you've all been waiting to see is the infamous chainsaw wielding sweet simple leather face he sometimes scared and confused other times a bit more outright mean and at one point we'll even see him fall in love but most of the time Leatherface is a bit less evil than other killers like Michael or Jason because he's usually being taken advantage of and ordered around by the rest of his much more malicious family members now with all that table-setting out of the way let's finally start the meal and get to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre skills [Music] the movie begins with a title crawl read by night courts John Larroquette in his first ever role for them an ideal exam or afternoon drive became a nightmare it implies that the movie was based on true events and although some aspects of Leatherface and his family were loosely based on Ed Gein the butcher of Plainfield who would make furniture out of stolen corpses the plot of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre is entirely fictional after establishing the setting of the summer of 73 we see flashbulb pictures of a crime scene with a sound effect that would come to be iconic it's used to great effect here which will not be the case in some of the sequels the crime scene snapshots lead into a strangely beautiful long shot of a desecrated corpse in the cemetery as a radio broadcast reports a recent spree of unsolved grave robbing sneer the fictional town of new Texas this intro was all very understated and eerie as is the title card and the opening credits like seriously is that the friggin Sun what does that mean it feels like I'm back in film school but in a good way we come out of all that onto an armadillo in Texas Tom I always thought it was pronounced Amarillo driving down these Texan roads is a band full of youngsters and this 30 year old disco Stu lookin dude who's pretending that he's still in his 20s don't worry buddy I can relate horrors first ever final girl Sally Hardesty is traveling to her grandfather's grave to make sure it hasn't been robbed as part of that spree the radio was talking about while a local takes her to check on it her wheelchair-bound brother Franklin has to hang back and listen to an old-fashioned horror harbinger of doom I see things oh yeah what do you see pal besides the bottom of that bottle on the way to their old family home the kids pass a slaughterhouse where Franklin says their grandpa used to work he goes into detail about the cattle killing procedures to this dude Kirk and his girlfriend Pam who's the kind of gal who will ask you what your sign is five minutes after she meets ya Saturn's a bad influence it's just particularly a bad influence because it's a retrograde they see a hitchhiker on the side of the road and decide to pick him up because it's too damn hot for a person to be just walking around here the hitchhiker played with a terrifying unstable Ness by Edwin Neill says his whole family works in the meat industry and inside his little net knapsack he's got the pictures to prove it those are uh yeah real nice guy he ends up grabbing Franklin's pocket knife right out of his hand and uses it to cut himself Oh while some wonderfully jolly music plays on the radio heart road trips the best Edwin Neil's memorable performance as the hitchhiker was modeled after his nephew who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia though as he noted in an interview about it his nephew was never once violent lots of horror movies this series especially used people with abnormal psychology zazz villains but it's always important to remember that in real life those people are more often victims than perpetrators of violence the hitchhiker takes a picture of Franklin and tries to force him to buy it $2.00 it's a good picture but when the kids say no thanks he gets upset and lights the picture on fire with some gunpowder as if that wasn't bad enough he then takes out a straight razor and cuts Franklin's arm with it that finally gets them to pull over and kick the hitchhiker out and the kids drive away as he marks their van with his blood and blows raspberries in their wake you kids should have been more careful you're living in a post Charlie Manson world here they pull up to a gas station slash BBQ joint and asked as a proprietor if he knows where they can find their old family home you boys don't want to go best round old house hey ho dude you don't know where I want to mess around the station is out of gas though so the only things they leave with are a bag full of barbecue and a near empty tank they get to the old family house and start exploring it with Sally showing the others her old rooms disco Steve's lerton with the final girl poor Franklin's unable to come upstairs though which makes him feel pretty left out and leads to him also blowing raspberries in frustration kinda like the hitchhiker what I love about Franklin though is that he's only partly sympathetic because he's also super whiny and obnoxious as all hell in fact actor Paul Partain rest in peace decided to stay in character for the entire shoe so the rest of the cast ended up avoiding him on set unfortunately Franklin was such a whiny bastard I was afraid if I ever took him off that I couldn't get him back and so I kept him on yes it was real effective we're ready to kill each other hey Pam and Kirk head out to an old watering hole only to find it's been dried up but then they hear an engine running at a nearby farmhouse and head over there to see if there's any spare gas that they can buy for their van judging by the carpark they find in the back yard these kids might just be the luckiest travelers in all of Texas or at least that's probably what they're thinking right now they go around to the front porch where Kirk finds a nasty tooth that he puts into Pam's hands she don't want no Tooth Fairy money and storms off while Kirk's mam leenock accidentally opens the front door not too much to look at inside unless you're a big fan of taxidermy and Twin Peaks ho and pig squealing Kirk happens to love all three of those things so he steps inside for a fun time only for this to happen just as with livestock the first hammer hit doesn't kill Kirk instantly so Leatherface has to hit him again before taking him back to the kitchen with an iconic sliding door slam came over perfect outside Pam notices that Kirk has disappeared and we get another iconic shot that follows her from a low angle as she slowly approaches the house this shot was a last-minute idea by cinematographer Daniel Pearl that the producers tried to nix since it wasn't on the shot list tobe Hooper overrode the producers and it's since become one of the most famous shots from the film even if actress Terry McMinn wasn't a big fan of it at first and then I saw in CinemaScope and Technicolor my cheeks right in the screen and I was completely horrified three years she has since come around to it though I'm laughing now because no I think it's great get back up there just like Kirk Pam also lets herself into the house which kind of makes this a home invasion movie if you look at it from leather faces perspective especially when Pam starts tripping all over the place and trashing his stuff come on Pam this is the very important chicken room they keep their best bones in there and don't even think about sitting on that scale of futa that thing's on loan from guillermo del toro all of the crazy bone art in this room and throughout the movie was made by production designer Robert Burns who also taxidermied an actual armadillo corpse for that shot in the beginning of the film Bob burns was one of the most pivotal players in this movie success he would literally drive around to local farms gathering actual animal bones to make all these Sawyer family props without him and his creepy decorations this movie wouldn't be half as effective as it is after taking a long slow ass motherfucking look at all the whores surrounding her Pam finally decides to go on and get only to run into leather face on her way out yet another classic moment occurs when he grabs her on the porch and heaves her back into the house and it only gets worse for Pam when he takes her to the kitchen and uses a meat hook to hang her up like so many animal carcasses although its brutal and terrifying its shot in a surprisingly tame way which is also the case when Leatherface revs his chainsaw up and gets to carving into Kirk's corpse none of this is pleasant but it's a whole lot less explicit than you'd probably expect that'll change in the sequels when Kirk and Pam are gone longer than expected gary offers to go look for them and travels through the woods as the Sun Goes Down disco Steve walking into the sunset he gets to the old house and also comes around front where he proves that B&E is just part and parcel for all these rude ass kids or thirty year olds he heads back into leather faces flavor and although the meathook is empty there are sounds coming from the freezer he opens it to find Pam wait why is she still wasn't she just hope there she is get on up girl one of the best things about this movie is the sound design from all the industrial sounds that tobe Hooper recorded in his own home to the sudden instances of loudness like that one hand this one another face runs in and smashes Jerry's stall to kill him nice and quick disco Steve hopping on the killcount with Jerry taken care of Leatherface puts Pam back in the icebox and that's actually the last time we see her so I have no choice but to put her on the kill count now maybe she froze to death in there I don't know what to tell you man regardless Leatherface is getting sick of playing defense here well where are all these darn kids even coming from gosh I moved to the countryside to get away from hooligan Reed the late Gunnar Hanson played Leatherface so perfectly in this movie that it's easy to feel bad for the poor guy just keep looking at your messed-up teeth Leatherface it'll all be okay my sweet boy since Jerry had the keys in his pocket the hardest ISA blings are stranded by the van so they end up having to set off into the darkness to find him man it is super freakin dark in these woods Franklin could you please shine that flashlight somewhere useful stop God's fucking love the face head he saws into Franklin like a sapling carving the poor boy's body up right there in his wheelchair while the sister watches it screams like a madwoman fun fact the blood sprays here came from Hooper and makeup artist Dottie pearl crouching down on either side of the wheelchair and spitting fake blood out of their mouths on to other things Sallie eventually gets the sense to run away and heads through the thickets to the only light she sees hoping it'll bring her salvation from the chainsaw wielding maniac on her heel but of course the light ends up being leather faces fun house of horrors and he don't exactly need a key to get through that front door well he saws into it Sallie runs upstairs and into a back room where she finds a corpse or two sitting in chairs unable to offer her any advice we'll see a lot of dried-up corpses of unknown people in the chainsaw series and I won't be including them on the kill cow it's fine don't worry about it rather worried about poor Sally since Leatherface is finally through the door Sally's not done running though and doesn't even hesitate to crash through the upstairs window and fall to the ground to escape her would-be killer we start the second lap of Sally's final girl circuit which once again takes us through the haunted forest the finish line of this lap is that gas station they had stopped dead earlier Sally bursts through a side door and falls onto the floor but Leatherface doesn't seem to follow her inside instead the old man from the gas station sits her up and tells her everything's gonna be okay he'll go get his truck and take her to a hospital while he's out Sally notices the sizzling meat this guy's got cooking which you know wouldn't be all that bad on its own except when he comes back he's sporting an awfully creepy smile on his face oh and also he's got a human size sack and some rope yeah them some red flags girl Sally wisely grabs a knife to defend herself with but everybody knows that broomstick beats nine oh and Sally broomstick also beat Sally the old man who's known as the cook in this movie but will come to be known as Drayton Sawyer knocks Sally out and ties her up then bad sir and drags her into his truck Mahan poor Sally really out of the frying pan and into the cook fire with this one I don't get out too uncomfortable down there well I would be if he stopped poking me with that broomstick dick the cook slash Drayton Sawyer is an absolutely loathsome motherfucker and he's played brilliantly by Jim Sadao who was pretty much the only experienced actor in this movie as Drayton approaches the Sawyer house he sees the hitchhiker in his native state walking down the side of the road Drayton gets out of the truck and yells some slurs up a hitchhiker before giving him the old broom stick beat down in another of this movies brilliant and beautiful shops cut damn I love this cinematography they get to the house with Drayton still Hootin and Hollerin at the hitchhiker cuz it turns out these dudes are brothers to each other and to Leatherface it's weird I always used to think that Drayton was the hitchhiker and Leatherface is dad but I guess he's just the oldest brother and right now he's taking that brotherly broomstick to his youngest sibling Leatherface leave him alone dre-dre all he wants to do right now is dress and sound like mrs. Doubtfire the hitch-hiker who will come to be known as nubbins ties up Sally and discovers her identity much to his delight yeah Sally's in a real bad place right now and if you don't want to watch chaotic misery and puts it on a captive girl for 10 minutes straight well uh I got some bad news for your friend before the festivities can begin though you better get grandpa and bring him downstairs yeah set that dusty boy right at the head of the table the Sawyer boys cut open Sally's hand and tell their granddad to take this her blood and drink of it and he does man I thought that dude was dead but turns out all we needed was some teenager blood and he turns into the Six Flags guy the Sawyer bus is coming and everybody's jumping grandpa Sawyer the character is supposedly a hundred and twenty four years old but he was played by John Dugan who was only 19 at the time the characters incredible makeup which took five to seven hours to apply was done by dr. w II Barnes in his one and only film credit his actual job was as a plastic surgeon also if you did grandpa Sawyer's dance moves here you'll be happy to know John Dugan can still do them nearly 40 years later sadly passes out and when she comes to she finds herself in the middle of a fucking nightmare her hands tied down to some other hands and her shrieks of suffering only mocked and echoed by her tormentors whoa ho and is that a face lamp up top Hey look at that face lamp well sorry Drayton if you didn't want me commenting on that face lamp maybe don't have a face lamp this miserable dinner scene is the most horrific part of the movie by far and was also the most torturous thing to film they shot for over 24 hours straight although there is some dispute as to the exact number that proved to be like a 27-hour shooting day 26 hour it was like a 27 hours shoot almost 36 hours straight we shot since they filmed in July in the middle of Texas with the windows blacked out and a bunch of filled lights all over the place internal temperatures reached a hundred and twenty degrees cooking the meat they were using as props and making plenty of people sick boy was it hot in the read got rotten Minari I never did get ill physically we're a lot of people did they run out of smack here there was a moment during the film when during the dinner scene when I went out and threw up Sally tries to beg Drayton for mercy but that goes about as well as you'd expect it to the hitch-hiker says that his older brother can't do shit because he's just the cook and it's the younger bros who have to do all the distasteful killing work I just can't take no pleasure in killing to get out of this table set hellscape sally even offers up the only thing she has but this plea of desperation falls on deaf ears these men aren't motivated by usual desires they're just sadistic cannibals who take pleasure in other people's pain you'll find no sympathy from them Sally no matter how hard you look with your eyes damn you're looking hard too huh like blood vessel hard Drayton tells his younger brothers to get on with it and kill her but the hitch-hiker decides that grandpas the man for the job you always lay arm him with a hammer and send Sally into a screaming pile of junk cos then they untie her and bring her over to grandpa's killin bucket and what follows is a super darkly comedic scene where grandpa who's supposedly the best at killing can't even hold the hammer in his hand long enough to strike Sally tobe Hooper would try to focus more on dark humor like this and Texas Chainsaw - which i think he does - pretty good effect with drained cheering him on and Leatherface all but doing the work for him grandpa finally starts landing blows on the back of Sally's head but when the hitchhiker tries to take over Sally seizes the opportunity and gets away from that once again crashing through a window to escape like a baller she's been tortured by the Sawyer's so long it's already freaking morning but she wastes no time limping down the road with the hitchhiker already in hot pursuit and his younger brother Leatherface rushing out to join him the hitchhiker catches up to Sally and slashes at her back playing with his prey long enough that she manages to get out to the main road right as the semi-truck rolls up to them Sally gets away from the hitchhiker who's not quite as lucky and instead gets the gauge cream treatment by this big rigs big-ass tires for this death they filmed him getting hit by the truck in Reverse a real simple trick and then obviously used the dummy for the under tread body Sally washes the truck pull over and although the driver gets out to help her he knope's right back into the cab after seeing leather face and his chainsaw for some reason instead of driving away he and Sally climb out of the trucks passenger side door I seriously don't know why they did that but at least the truck driver grabs a monkey wrench on his way out so he can ask Leatherface knock knock hit you in the head with a monkey wrench that causes Leatherface to fall and cut up his own leg poor boy but he's back up in no time as Sally and the truck driver haul ass down the street a blue pickup truck joins the madness and pulls over long enough for Sally to hop inside and uh just don't think about the semi-truck driver some say he's still running down the street to this very day Sally is driven away from Leatherface in a few more infamous shot some of which are featured in my extended intro and her terror turns into glee as she realizes that she's finally escaped the unspeakable horrors wrought by this crazed Chainsaw murderer and his sadistic family of cannibals how many people did the Sawyer's invite to their dinner party let's find out and get to the numbers five people died in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre which might be lower than you expected but I tried to warn you about that up top the victims consisted of four men and only one woman giving us a mostly blueberry meat pie and with the runtime of 83 minutes that left us with a kill on average every sixteen point six minutes I'll get the golden chainsaw for coolest kill to curb it kicks off the movies kill count and comes out of nowhere and I love the way it's done in mostly silence - almost ready for lamest kill we'll go to Jerry I guess I actually think all these skills are effective but if I include the meet hooking as part of Pam's death then I think it's got to go to Jerry and that's it The Texas Chainsaw Massacre came out in 1974 and it was actually banned in the UK for 23 years tobe Hooper would make the drastically different sequels a dozen years later which I'll be looking at next week but until then I'm James Agee nice this has been the kill Kyle thanks a lot for watching this kill cap I want to thank some patrons like Damian chaos gamer Taku Josh green and light and Colour lab who has a channel where he does kill cows for games I'm just as excited as all of you to be covering the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series the only reason it took me so long is because I like to space out the big franchises it wouldn't be as fun for me if I just knocked them all out right in a row thanks everybody be good people

Channel: undefined

Views: 7,989,325

Rating: 4.9383669 out of 5

Keywords: horror, dead meat, movies, scary, films, kills, kill count, body count, james a. janisse, jaj, pine commander boogie, tobe hooper, chainsaw, texas, massacre, tcm, original, kim henkel, marilyn burns, leatherface, paul a. partain, edwin neal, sawyers, hitchhiker, jim siedow, cook, gunnar hansen, sally, franklin, cannibals, ed gein, slasher, franchise, series, final girl, exploitation, DMKC

Id: PYIg8wNKymw

Length: 22min 4sec (1324 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/TheKazarka]

Glad to be an inspiration for a thumbnail

[u/yoyogamer64]

Imma watch this the second i get home

[u/ROBOT_B9]

So, back in the day, my mom had a blind date with a guy who took her to this movie. IIRC, she ran out of the theater after Kirk's death.

[u/YOUREABOT]

All I need now is a hellraiser kill count and my life will be complete

[u/RopeTuned]

Finally all the dumb YT comments will stop

[u/Khalbrae]

You lucky Americans can stream this wonderful movie on Shudder, and rent/buy from Amazon.

Canadians like me only get the blu-ray as an option or if you're lucky it may be available for rent at your library (sadly, not at the Ottawa public library) (The Canadian side of Justwatch didn't even have an entry at all for Texas Chain Saw 1974)

In the UK it can be rented/bought from Rakuten.

[u/Esquilax21]

I give it a week before peeps beg for Final Destination

[u/[deleted]]

Poor james

[u/greeny74]

Anyone have a link to the channel James mentions at the end that does video game kill counts? I'd love to check it out