Homework Movie - Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

Up until the early 70's the horror genre had been mostly creatures from another place that have come to take over the humans. It was in this time period that films took to the streets, local communities, and neighborhoods that the audience grew up in. With movies like Roman Polanski's Repulsion and Rosemery's Baby, the audience was getting into peoples homes to see what goes on when the doors are closed. In Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, we're seeing a group of friends on a road trip that come across a home that they shouldn't have been anywhere near them.

This movie didn't have any well-known names as stars and most of them have done few movies after this. The star of the show was the story about a demented family catching their meal for the evening. That meal would be comprised of several college aged kids going to visit a family member's grave in connection to a recent grave robbery in town. Once there, the group find they are stranded and out of gas to get home. It continues to get worse from there, but all the while, there isn't a bit of gratuitous sex or violence much like today's "Torture porn" style movies such as Saw or House of 1,000 Corpses which were inspired in part by Chain Saw. The sole survivor is never naked, and for a horror genre movie that's a completely rare occurrence.

For future films, there is a reverence for films like Chain Saw that shows a side to the horror genre that most people don't realize. These movies are also funny if you think about them for any length of time. Who runs up stairs when you've got a sadistic, chain saw wielding killer on your tail? Right. But in movies like Shaun of the Dead or my favorite of recent European horror Severance, these scenarios are usually one or two people being chased that go somewhere that they would end up being caught.

This movie had inspired so many others to create films, even some comedy writers in the 90's had to put a reference to Chain Saw in a movie called Summer School. The two characters that were horror geeks were determined to share this great film with the foreign exchange student and one of them went by the name Chainsaw in the whole movie. Not to mention the three sequels before Michael Bay got his hands on the franchise. His big budgeted version hold no candle to the classic.

Homework Movie - Bride of Frankeistein - James Whale

Continuing on the Universal franchise, Bride of Frankenstein follows the monster back into the village to find Doctor Frankenstein in order to create a companion for his original creation so they can live together outside of the regular world's way. Boris Karloff in this movie plays the Monster for his second time of three movies, with only the House of Frankenstein made in 1944 being his only in the series where he's not the monster. I was impressed to see that he was taught to speak in the role this go around, since the first Frankenstein all he did was grunt for the most part.

With only four years separating releases of these titles, the advances in makeup FX was noticeable to me as that's something I look at when watching a horror movie now. The Bride had smaller but still noticeable scarring on her neck where the good doctor operated on her that didn't look fake, but like someone skilled made careful cuts to keep the skin in tact and easily reapplied.

Something that is fascinating to me is that this was a pre-code horror movie, as were much of Universal's films at the time. Horror movies didn't get much Code attention until sound was added because the terrified screams and the chilling soundtrack made the audiences squeamish. The other movies out during this time that showed graphic violence and sexual undertones got more attention up to that point.

Comparing this movie to the clips from class, I reviewed The Island of Lost Souls again at home to get a full feeling of Dr. Moreau's, played extraordinarily creepy by Charles Laughton. Of the two doctors, there was a lot more remorse for his wrongdoings out of Frankenstein in Bride than Moreau had up to his demise. It was only through The Monster's urging did Dr. Frankenstein agree to create another so hideous to keep him company.

I did enjoy both as I could watch them more than once and still find new things in each movie. There wasn't an over stylized or graphic violence to either movie and what violence there was is now considered tame in comparison to today's gore for the sake of gore films. Back in the days of the first screenings of these films, however, the story might have been different.