Bounding Into Halloween, Night 11: Looks Like Meat Is Back On The Menu In ‘Bone Tomahawk’ & ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ (1974)
The summer is over, but this doesn’t mean that the barbeque has to end. Tonight’s double helping presents two family units who are from completely different backgrounds, but they both share a favorite pastime that spans across the generations of their respective (and more than likely narrow) family trees, and that said pastime is cannibalism. Now, let’s eat!
Bone Tomahawk (2015)
This diamond in the rough is the directorial debut of author, S. Craig Zahler (Dragged Across Concrete), and it takes place in the fictional “Old West” town of Bright Hope at the end of the 19th century. It all starts when two bandits get on the bad side of a cave-dwelling tribe by trespassing onto their sacred burial grounds. The lone survivor (David Arquette) flees to Bright Hope to escape his pursuers, but they snatch him from lock-up in the middle of the night, along with two of the townsfolk.
The sheriff (Kurt Russell) immediately assembles a rescue party to save the three people, but he receives a warning from assimilated native, The Professor (Zahn McClarnon), that the tribe they’re hunting are a group of reclusive inbred cannibals who’ve been shunned by all the local tribes, and everyone just tries to avoid them. Although, this does little to deter the sheriff. He sets out to retrieve his constituents from the hungry jaws of death, and “HELL IS COMING WITH HIM!!!”
A modern cult classic, it only received a limited theatrical release, but it exploded on DVD. The buzz was like a wildfire, and it didn’t take long before every hardcore movie buff was harassing everyone they met to watch the movie as soon as humanly possible. It’s a deliberate slow-burning western yarn that builds into an effective horror story by the end.
It also stars Patrick Wilson (Watchmen, The Conjuring, Aquaman), Sid Haig (Foxy Brown, Galaxy of Terror, The Devil’s Rejects), Sean “Ray Finkle” Young, and Party of Five’s Matthew Fox. Kurt Russell basically repeats his legendary Wyatt Earp performance from Tombstone (1993) in a way that’s reminiscent of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s quasi-reprisal of his Conan role in Red Sonja from 1985, but it’s still a perfect fit.
Bone Tomahawk is waiting over on TUBI, and here’s the obligatory trailer:
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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
The film which you are reading about is an account of the tragedy that befell a group of five idiotic youths, in particular “Screaming” Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) and her fat, obnoxious, whiner-on-wheels brother, Franklin (Paul A. Partain).
It is all the more tragic in that they were young, but even had they lived very, very, VERY long lives, they could not have expected, nor would they wished to behold as much of the mad and macabre as they were to see that fateful day. For them, an idyllic afternoon drive in their creep van became a nightmare. The events of that day were to lead to the discover of one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre…
Here it is, folks! the legendary grindhouse classic from the late Tobe Hooper (Poltergeist, Lifeforce, The Funhouse) that helped give birth to the Slasher genre. As stated above, it’s about five idiots who pick up the wrong hitchhiker (Edwin Neil).
After he shares with them his enthusiasm for slaughterhouse work, he invites the youths back to his house for dinner with his family. His brother, Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen), makes a mean bowl of head cheese.
Like with Bone Tomahawk, it’s a slow burner that will weed out most younger viewers, and their microscopic attention spans, but that’s their loss.
While the pacing might be quite dated, the eerie atmosphere hasn’t aged a day in the past five decades, but the scene near the end where Sally is screaming her head off at the dinner table could’ve benefited from a 2 to 3-minute shaving.
With that said, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is playing on TUBI, and here’s the original trailer:
