We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974) – 2020 FAMILY REUNION VIRTUAL EVENT, NIGHT 2
Back in 2020, Exurbia Films hosted a “family reunion virtual event” in which viewers were able to watch director Tobe Hooper’s classic horror film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre along with legendary movie host and drive-in movie critic (not to mention Chainsaw super-fan) Joe Bob Briggs and members of the film’s cast and crew. It was a two-night event, with co-writer/producer Kim Henkel and cast members John Dugan, Edwin Neal, William Vail, Teri McMinn, Allen Danzinger, and Ed Guinn watching the movie on the first night – and I wrote about that half of the event last August. On the second night, Joe Bob watched the movie with Henkel and crew members Larry Carroll (editor), Ted Nicolaou (location sound recordist), Wayne Bell (production sound and music), Ron Bozman (production manager), and Daniel Pearl (cinematographer). Since last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of the events depicted in the movie and this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of its release, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has been on my mind a lot lately – so I decided to take in another viewing of “Night 2” of the Exurbia event.
As with Night 1, the movie plays out in the middle of the screen while the screens showing Joe Bob and all of the crew members are shown around the sides and bottom of the central image. If you’re a Chainsaw super-fan like Joe Bob, chances are you won’t learn a whole lot about the making and release of the film from watching this presentation... but it didn’t need to be especially educational to be worthwhile. It’s just fun to watch the movie along with some of the people who had a hand in making it. And viewers who haven’t spent a good portion of their time digging into Chainsaw information will probably learn quite a bit.
As the movie goes along, we hear that Hooper and Pearl considered shooting the film on 35mm, but that thought was set aside due to the fact that Hooper wanted to be able to shoot scenes handheld, and there were only a few 35mm cameras available that could be used for handheld shooting at that time, and they were out of the project’s budget range. That’s why they ended up shooting on that beautifully grainy 16mm film stock viewers have been watching for the last fifty years. Nicolaou talks about the fact that the van the characters ride around in the movie belonged to him, and the crew didn’t go easy on it. There’s talk of scavenging for animal bones that we used to decorate the home of the chainsaw-wielding Leatherface and his cannibalistic family. There’s the amusing detail that the owner of the house used for the Leatherface residence thought the crew was only going to be using the place for three days, when they were actually there for a couple weeks. Pearl reveals that the flashlight held by the victim character Franklin wasn’t just a regular flashlight; it needed to be more powerful for the film they were shooting on. So there’s a 650 watt bulb in that flashlight, connected to a battery belt that was hidden in Franklin’s wheelchair.
There are also, of course, mentions of some of the bizarre moments that everyone endured on the set, like when Hooper just let heroine Marilyn Burns scream for eleven minutes straight. And if you’ve ever wondered how Wayne Bell created that awesomely strange score for the film, he tells some of it here, letting us know that he used children’s musical instruments, cymbals, and a stand-up bass, plus pots and pans. When characters first enter Leatherface’s home, we hear the sounds of animals on the soundtrack... and it turns out those weren’t recordings of animals or even of Gunnar Hansen as Leatherface, but rather a recording of Bell’s father making animal sounds.
Joe Bob and the crew members had so much to say about the movie, their conversation continues for twenty minutes after the end credits have finished rolling. So this night of the event lasted for 104 minutes, just 1 minute shorter than the cast night of the event.
I love The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and love hearing stories about the making of it. I am one of those fans who has spent probably too much time digging into this movie... so I appreciated having the chance to share this viewing of the film with Joe Bob and the crew members.
The following review originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
Teresa Sutherland wrote the screenplay for Emma Tammi’s 2018 horror Western The Wind and was part of the writing staff on the Mike Flanagan series Midnight Mass, and now she has made her feature directorial debut with the horror film Lovely, Dark, and Deep, which she was inspired to make after hearing “real-life conspiracy theories surrounding the unusually high number of unsolved missing person cases that happen in national parks and forests”. She came up with a theory of her own... something dealing with an ancient supernatural force that still operates in these isolated places “where it still gets dark”... and delivered it in the form of a movie that has some interesting ideas, but doesn’t make for a very satisfying viewing experience.
Georgina Campbell, whose breakthrough role in the genre hit Barbarian (not to mention a BAFTA win for Murdered by My Boyfriend) has led to her landing roles in things like Bird Box Barcelona and an upcoming film directed by a Shyamalan daughter, stars in Lovely, Dark, and Deep as a young woman named Lennon, who has taken a job as a ranger at the Arvores National Park with an ulterior motive: when she was a child, her sister Jenny went missing in this park, and she intends to scour the land in hopes of figuring out what exactly happened to her sibling. When a ranger stationed in a remote location disappears, leaving behind only a note where he said he owes the land a body, Lennon gets the chance to replace him for 90 days, which she’s going to spend searching through the back country. One of the podcasts Lennon listens to at a couple different points in the movie informs us that Arvores National Park has the highest number of missing persons cases out of any place in the world, which certainly deepens the mystery she’s trying to solve. It’s an interesting set-up, and Campbell was a strong choice for the lead. She has the acting skills and the screen presence to carry the entire film on her shoulders, which is very important since she’s the only person on screen for long stretches of it.
While Campbell does a great job with the material she was given to work with, she was let down by the script a bit, as we don’t really get to know Lennon as a person. We know she’s deeply traumatized by the disappearance of her sister, she’s quiet and has such high anxiety that she’ll chew her fingernails until her fingers bleed, but I don’t feel that I know much about her beyond that. There’s nothing to go by other than her drive to find missing people.
Sutherland took the slow burn approach with this one, so we end up spending a lot of time watching Lennon quietly make her way around the forest, going about her ranger duties. This sort of build-up needs to lead to a great pay-off to be worth the time spent on it... but the movie doesn’t have that. Instead, there comes a point where it goes completely off the rails, with Lennon slipping into some different plain of existence where she’s just bombarded with trippy visuals for a stretch of 40 minutes or so. This part of the film will still work for some viewers who are more inclined to go along for the ride with something like this, but for me there are few things more irritating than when a movie turns into nothing but scene after scene of a character just bumbling their way through nightmares. Especially when there’s no Freddy Krueger around to liven things up.
Lovely, Dark, and Deep is not something I’ll ever want to watch again, but the writer/director does show promise with it. As mentioned, there are interesting ideas in the story, they just didn’t come together in a way I found to be satisfying. The concept of this film would have worked very well for a short film, but there’s not enough substance here to sustain the feature running time. Padded out beyond reason, the movie’s 87 minutes eventually start to feel interminable. When we reach the end, the destination wasn’t worth the journey, because things kind of just sputter out. But even when it’s frustrating to watch, which is for a large percentage of the time, it’s still a nice movie to look at, as Sutherland and cinematographer Rui Poças were able to capture some great images of the forest where it all takes place. (The story is set in the United States, but the filming location was Portugal.)
So we have intriguing ideas, a good lead actress, and nice cinematography, yet the movie still falls short. I think Sutherland could make an effective horror movie at some point, but Lovely, Dark, and Deep just didn’t work for me.
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