A few time on this journey I have watched a film which was so rubbish that writing about it seemed an even further waste of my time. Hoping to forget yesterday’s low-budget disappointment, and following relatively closely to Halloween (which I surmised was alright as films go), today was time for another classic slasher, similarly highly rated, and spawning a similarly high number of sequels, prequels and reboots. It’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) (or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, not sure which one is right).

Spolier alert: it’s rubbish.

It deals with the standard slasher set up of young people ending up somewhere, then getting murdered one by one. There’s a slight twist on who the killer is, but it’s mostly a plotless, low-budget pile of nonsense which involves a lot of screaming. It seems to follow the old horror adage that the American countryside is terrifying and full of criminally crazed redneck types. There’s a lot of abattoir talk.

My family’s always been in meat.

Everyone is killed with a chainsaw? You would think that wouldn’t you.

What are the best bits (intentionally-vague slight-spoilers)? I can’t think of a single thing. To be honest, it was a struggle to keep watching it, let alone care about what was going on. The killer, leatherface, is big.

What are the worst bits? The fact I had to watch it, closely followed by the fact that it is considerd one of the high-points in horror movie making.

Anything else to say? After 21 films, including a large number which have very good IMDB ratings or otherwise are highly valued in the genre, I believe that whilst there are good horror films, the vast majority are bad or truly awful. The graph from ‘Excellent’ to ‘Truly truly awful’ would apparently rise exponentially from a quite flat, x-axis-hugging start.