Dark Sky/Exurbia/Exhibit A's Chain Reactions is the latest documentary on Tobe Hooper/Kim Henkel's 1974 classic, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
The movie (coproduced with Henkel) was constructed by writer/director Alexandre O. Phillipe, who's fashioned documentaries on Psycho, Alien, The Exorcist, David Lynch, George Lucas and William Shatner. Unlike several of the latter, Chain Reactions doesn't lean on revisionist determinations. (There was no anti-mother uprising that spawned Psycho, and Ellen Ripley's ascent as a feminist icon was unpremeditated.) Chain Reactions instead allows Texas Chain Saw's aesthetic quality to seize the reins, never clamping its results with a carved-in-stone outcome or overriding theme. In other words, it's a collective analysis of why the movie works on a visceral level, based on informed opinion.
Its commentators include Stephen King (who explains why Texas Chain Saw succeeds through gritty brevity), Karyn Kusama (who considers the movie's Americana from a sardonic, social slant), Alexandra Heller-Nicholas (who reminisces on Australia's disconcerting, VHS "yellow" print), Takashi Mike (whose missed chance to catch Charles Chaplin's City Lights led him to become a lifelong, Leatherface fan) and Patton Oswalt (who compares Texas Chain Saw to F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu, praising Hooper's use of idyllic scenery as a contrasting tool to accentuate his movie's abject terror).
Indeed (and beyond debate), the documentary's reactions are individualized (angled by ample explication), but again, the door is left wide open for ongoing analysis and discussion. The scholarly culmination, therefore, holds a satisfying, common denominator: For its raw simplicity, Texas Chain Saw says much more than not.
Because of its honest bracketing, Phillipe's documentary replicates Hooper's approach, penetrating viewers by pure unpretentiousness: a respectful turn that fans of the macabre, fifty-year-old masterpiece will appreciate.
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