CHAIN REACTIONS Review

Let's get this straight out of the way because it really matters to this review and will come up again as I talk about Chain Reactions: I'm far from the world's biggest fan of the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

(Now Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, that's a different story. I kind of love that movie)

To be absolutely fair, I've only seen the 1974 horror classic once, and perhaps it was a "wrong time, wrong mindset" kind of thing. Maybe if I watched it again, I'd be far more into it. But I distinctly recall not finding all that much about TCM to really grab me. I thought the acting was borderline terrible, and the third act is a never-ending stream of screaming and cackling that, frankly, gave me a headache when I watched it. I've taken shit for this, but yes: one of my problems with the movie is that it's too "loud". It devolves into just being noise, and I found that to be far more obnoxious than scary or effective.

I had gone through a stretch since COVID started where I was determined to catch up on some 1970's horror outings that I missed throughout my life, and most landed right where you would think they would. Jaws? Loved it! The Exorcist? Loved it! Black Christmas? Loved it! But Texas Chainsaw Massacre? It just didn't land.

Still, I recently got a screener for the new documentary, Chain Reactions, which features several talking heads explaining what TCM means to them. Writer and Director Alexandre O. Phillippe assembled a cast of stars (Patton Oswalt, Stephen King, Takashi Miike, Karyn Kusama, and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas) to come on board and give their thoughts and experiences with the film.

Honestly, it can be fascinating at times. You expect to hear someone compare Texas Chainsaw to, say, Nosferatu. There's a horror link there that just makes sense. But you perhaps don't expect to have someone point out similarities between Tobe Hooper's picture and Gone With The Wind.

Oswalt and King are the two figures from the documentary that I am most familiar with, so I was of course eager to hear what they had to say on the subject. But the speakers I found most interesting were Takashi Miike and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. They had delightful perspectives of fans not from America, and they discussed TCM's more taboo status in their home countries (Japan and Australia, respectively). Miike has a story about how he originally saw the movie on accident, as he went out to see the Charlie Chaplin flick City Lights, but couldn't get a ticket, so he opted for Texas Chainsaw as a backup option. It would go on to color his entire life as a filmmaker.

(Though I do hope he eventually saw City Lights; it's great)

Film critic and historian Heller-Nicholas talks about the washed-out, low quality version of the horror classic that was eventually released in her country, and how it was all shades of yellow. She related that to how filmmakers in Australia use yellow-washing to relay the feeling of oppressive heat, and that only strengthened her feelings on the film.

Along the way, we get a lot of the talking heads correlating TCM to other pictures that either have a personal or thematic link to it in the minds of the speakers. There is a lot of homework in this documentary, because many of the films that they associate with Texas Chainsaw are ones I have never heard of before, much less have seen. So it will be fun to rewatch Chain Reactions and make a list of movies I have to catch up on. This will probably mean more to true TCM fans that want to see anything that either derived from or inspired it, but still... I like catching up on things, too.

And that's ultimately what this documentary boils down to: If you are a real fan of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you'll likely get even more out of it than I did. This is not a behind-the-scenes making of type doc, the type of which I assume most fans have already seen and know all about; it's just the bringing together of like-minded superfans and letting them each talk for fifteen to twenty minutes on what Tobe Hooper's classic means to them.

So did Chain Reactions change my perspective on Texas Chainsaw Massacre? No. Well did it frustrate me to see people gushing over a film that didn't affect me the way it did them? Also no, because I'm not a total asshole, you know? I'm a big fan of people having different tastes than I do, and I love hearing folks talk about things that mean a lot to them. You should see how many conversations I've had with the wife over the book, musical, and movie versions of Wicked. Is Wicked something I'm dying to read? Not really. But I love hearing her talk about her passion for it.

Anyway, no Ups or Downs or Overall score for Chain Reactions because I find documentaries hard to grade against other movies. What am I going to do? Critique Stephen King's love for a fifty year old movie? But if you also love TCM or you enjoy documentaries or you just, like me, enjoy hearing people go on about their affection for pop culture, Chain Reactions is for you.