Analyzing ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’

Alexandre O. Philippe continues his journey into cinema with Chain Reactions, a critical analysis of what many view as a seminal work of horror, 1974’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. After devoting a film to the shower scene in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho) and exploring the influence of the The Wizard of Oz on director David Lynch (Lynch/(Oz), Philippe assembles a group of talkers to discuss the impact director Tobe Hooper’s raw chunk of horror had on them and on a genre that recently has grown in popularity and importance. Philippe relies on interviews with Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Stephen King, Karyn Kusama, and Australian critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas to dive deeply into the movie and its unquestionable impact on successive attempts at raw-boned horror. If you’re a devote of American horror, you undoubtedly know Leatherface, the chainsaw-wielding killer who sliced and diced those who had the misfortune of entering a world occupied by his leering, demented family. Philippe’s interviewees talk intelligently about the film, but, for me,  Oswalt’s analysis proved a standout. And who better to discuss Hooper's contribution to American horror than King? You’ll hear appreciations of a film that defined a horror aesthetic along with some consideration of whether Texas Chainsaw Massacre took a prescient look at the violent power unleashed by some of society's rejects. Is this analysis on point, or is Texas Chainsaw, to take the opposing extreme, an indulgence in cinema's trashiest impulses? To be honest, I’m not sure exactly where Texas Chainsaw belongs. Still, I love hearing smart analysis of films, and Philippe’s specificity and focus are creating an essential body of work for those of us who spend our lives in front of screens.

Walking in the shadow of death

  Francis Lawrence, who directed four films in the Hunger Games series, plunges into Stephen King territory with The Long Walk, an adaptation of the first novel King wrote.  Notably, the book appeared after Carrie (1974), King's first published work.

  Set in a dystopian world that resembles the present, the story focuses on 50 young men chosen by lot to participate in a lethal competition. They must walk at a brisk pace of three miles-per-hour. Those who quit or collapse will be executed on the spot. Only one will survive to reap the amazing rewards that have been promised to the winner.

 With help from a youthful cast led by Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson, Lawrence and writer J.T. Mollner adopt a minimalist approach that concentrates on the walk through depleted rural American landscapes that suggest a forlorn, declining America. 

    The walkers develop relationship but they're shadowed by doom. They know they woh't all make it to the end. Their banter sometimes reminded me of the way soldiers relate to one another in war movies. 

  The characters work their way through moments of  bonhomie, competitiveness, cruelty, and budding friendship. Many of them help and encourage one another, but they know that, in the end, their efforts will be futile. Some are bitter and cruel, notably Charlie Plummer's Barkovitch.

   Of course, the young men are being exploited. The officer supervising the walk (Mark Hamill's the Major) claims that these brave young men will inspire a sluggish population to overcome its laziness. Neither we nor they believe that the walkers want anything more than to be granted the prize, fulfillment of anything they wish for -- money, women, safety.

    Although he includes flashbacks involving Hoffman's character's mother (Judy Greer), Lawrence wisely sticks to the road, where we see those who violate the contest's rules shot by soldiers who accompany them in armored vehicles. 

   After hundreds of miles, some begin to stagger.

   Personal secrets are revealed as the characters get to know one another, but Long Walk works better the less you try to understand the logic of the world that created this exercise in competitive torture. 

    Those expecting a "big" King adaptation may be taken aback by the movie's lack of paranormal garnish. This is King in a minor key.

   Still, The Long Walk makes for an intense,  economical one-hour and 48-minute journey into a world where walkers seek to preserve their humanity in a country that seems intent on depriving them of it.

A Stephen King adaptation with heart

          

    Hardly a fright fest, The Life of Chuck -- a big-screen adaptation of a Stephen King novella --tells three interrelated stories in reverse order, beginning with the final chapter and working its way back to the start. 

    Life of Chuck might be classed with such big-screen King adaptations such as The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me. The Life of Chuck isn't as memorable as either of those, but it makes room for scenes with heart, even if it tends to wear its sentiments on its sleeve.

    The stories are connected by a character named  Chuck Krantz, a fellow who appears on TV and billboards during the first segment. "39 Great Years ! Thanks Chuck!," the ads read. Sounds important, but no one knows who Chuck Krantz is. A politician? A salesman? A banker? 

    Director Mike Flanagan, who directed King's Doctor Sleep, reveals more about Krantz as the movie progresses, but The Life of Chuck is less a mystery than a collection of small moments played against a doom-laden backdrop.

     Life of Chuck rests on a thematic cushion that includes stuffing from Carl Sagan's Cosmic Calendar (an encapsulation of the history of the universe in a single year) and Walt Whitman's Song of Myself.  The signature line from  Whitman's poem ("I contain multitudes") is introduced by a teacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the character who anchors the film's opening chapter.

    Like everyone else, Ejiofor's Marty Anderson is puzzled by the Krantz billboards. Marty also tries to cope with an escalating variety signals that suggest a possible end to ... well ... everything: the demise of the Internet, abandoned cars lining the streets of vacated cities, and massive power outages.

    Blame a mixture of man-made issues and cosmic comeuppance for the fraught condition that threatens humanity. But causes matter less than the way characters behave in the face of impending doom.

    Ejiofor and his estranged wife (Karen Gillan) eventually share a tender scene under a vast night sky, two lonely people facing a looming finality neither can comprehend. 

    The second story features a lively dance number (no, I'm not kidding) in which Tom Hiddleston, as the title character, sheds Chuck's buttoned-up  demeanor. Contrary to what the opening suggests, we learn that Chuck is no man of mystery: An otherwise anonymous accountant, he serves as the film's everyman.

     While attending a convention, Chuck passes a street drummer (Taylor Gordon), a Juilliard dropout who lays down some infectious beats. Chuck begins to dance. Annalise Basso plays a woman who joins the dance, a stranger Chuck pulls from the small crowd of gathered spectators. She becomes his partner in what might be the crowning moment of his life.

    The movie becomes more King-like in the first chapter, really its last. We meet Krantz as a boy, played at various ages by Cody Flanagan, Benjamin Pajak, and Jacob Tremblay. Chuck's parents died in an automobile accident, leaving him to live with his grandparents (Mia Sara and Mark Hamill). 

    Not long after arriving in Chuck's grandparents' home, the movie introduces a mystery centered on the cupola that Grandpa, otherwise genial but a bit too fond of alcohol,  keeps locked. The cupola opens the door to a bit of supernatural woo-woo.

     In keeping with the film's more grounded aspirations, Grandma teaches Chuck to dance; later, he must overcome his inhibitions to take the floor at a school dance, the kind of triumph that recalls too many other teen movies.

     I don't want to oversell the Life of Chuck. An over-explanatory narration delivered by Nick Offerman sometimes falls short of eloquence, and the movie loses steam during its coming-of-age conclusion.

     Moreover, The Life of Chuck can't quite bring off its ambitious juxtaposition of cosmic-scale extinction and personal mortality. But in the movie's best moments, Flanagan wisely encourages us to accept the inescapable while still mustering enough spirit to dance.

        

'The Monkey': Gore with a comic twist

 

Director Osgood Perkins won over horror fans (I wasn't one of them) with Longlegs, a 2024 movie that featured another unmoored performance from Nicolas Cage. Now Perkins returns with The Monkey, an adaptation of a 1980 short story by Stephen King. 

   Slickly realized and gurgling with blood-soaked humor, The Monkey focuses on twin brothers (both played by Theo James) who are tormented by a large toy monkey with a terrifying grin. When wound up, the monkey begins drumming ominously. Guess what? Someone is about to die. 

   Attempts to find laughter amid the gore meet with intermittent success; these include swarming hornets, a cobra that springs out of a hole on a golf course, and stampeding horses that turn a man's insides to mush. That's where we are, I guess. Inventive violence has become a measure of creativity. The fun -- if it's your cup of gore -- stems from the variety of ways Osgood and his team devise for characters to meet their ends.

   The Monkey reaches its finale when one brother (James's Hal) reunites with the teenage son (Colin O'Brien) he hasn't seen for years. Long divorced, Hal has kept his son at a distance to protect the kid from the monkey curse. 

  Despite antipathy between the two brothers and the burden of guilt one them carries, the movie can feel as if its marking time, offering bits of story until it's ready to serve up another piece of cleverly contrived gore.

   A final joke struck me as tastelessly cruel, but audiences can decide for themselves how far over-the-top they want to go with Osgood. I laughed some, but when I reflected on the movie, a lyric from an old Chuck Berry tune began to run through my mind. "Too much monkey business for me."

    

   

'Doctor Sleep:' a sequel we didn’t need

Ewan McGregor stars in a labored rendition of Stephen King’s follow-up to The Shining.

Perhaps as a way of establishing its bona fides, Doctor Sleep makes what struck me as strained references (I'll reveal no more) to The Shining, the movie it follows some 39 years after its release. I won't say more, but I begin this way because, for me, Doctor Sleep stands as an act of imposture, an attempt wring more from a story that already had been told. Of course, it's difficult to call the movie a ripoff: The movie stems from a 2013 sequel that Shining author Stephen King himself wrote.

In this overlong edition — the movie clocks in at 2 1/2 hours — Ewan McGregor plays a grown-up version of Danny Torrance, the kid from the original movie. Adrift in alcohol and dereliction, Danny winds up in a small New Hampshire town, where he joins AA and tries to make peace with the terrifying visions in his head. He receives help from an AA pal (Cliff Curtis) and from his mentor, played in the original by Scatman Crothers and in the sequel by Carl Lumbly.

To give the movie a plot, Danny hooks up with Abra Stone (Kyliegh Currran), a girl who has mighty shining powers; i.e., she can see things in other dimensions and project herself into distant places without leaving her bedroom. She also sees visions that scare her and are supposed to do the same to us.

The dread, in this case, stems from a traveling band of folks led by Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson), a woman whose extra-long life is sustained by sucking the life out of those with the ability to shine. Zahn McClarnon plays Crow Daddy, Rose’s devoted number two.

Lest the supply of demonic fiends runs short, Rose recruits a young blond woman (Emily Alyn Lind to her evil cause. It doesn’t take long for Lind’s character, who's given the charming nickname of Snakebite Andi, to become as bad as the rest of the group.

What any of this has to do with Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 original seems marginal, although by the end, director Mike Flanagan transports the story to Colorado for a big showdown between Danny and Rose at the fabled Overlook Hotel, which like lots of ‘80s real estate, has become a mere shadow of itself. Danny must save Abra and rid the world of this pesky group of soul-sucking demons.

More muddled than the usual King offering, Doctor Sleep can at times seem ridiculous as it groans under the weight of having to connect with its predecessor. The movie's title, by the way, derives from Danny’s ability to help the aging slip gently into death after he lands a job at a hospice. Just like falling asleep he assures the dying.

Stuck playing a character battling his inner demons, McGregor doesn’t do much to fill the movie’s center. Ferguson, embodying a series of adjectives -- sexy, demonic, vicious and snide — deserves credit for hitting the right notes.

I’m not going to belabor this one. Shining fans seeking a second helping probably will give the movie an initial boost, but even diehards will have to admit that Flanagan (Oculus) doesn’t have Kubrick’s visual sense nor can he imbue his movie with the brooding grandiosity that made the original seem like a major movie.

I don’t know if The Shining should be called a classic, but it still has some sway. This one? Just another day at the multiplex — or maybe considering its length, a day and a half.

'It' sends in the clown -- and he's a killer

Latest Stephen King adaptation likely to score with audiences. To me? A yawn.

The working-class adults in It, an adaptation of a 1,000-plus page 1986 Stephen King novel, are abusive, cruel and, in some cases, detestable. Whether this arises from economic pressures or stands as some sort of class bias isn't entirely clear. Maybe it doesn't matter because the adults aren't the obvious focal point of director Andy Muschietti's adaptation; it's their kids.

To explore the fears of adolescent life, It follows -- if distantly -- a 1990 TV adaptation in which Tim Curry distinguished himself as Pennywise, the clown who terrorizes the children of Derry, Maine.

Muschietti and a trio of writers (Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman) shift the time frame of King's novel from the 1950s to the 1980s and deal only with the first half of King's opus. A sequel is set to follow in which the teens of this edition return as adults.

Arriving more than 30 years after the novel's publication, this big screen version suffers from inevitable comparisons with a rash of other horror movies in which teens are terrorized by evil forces and by memories of another King-inspired movie, Stand By Me (1986).

By now, gory horror (icky streams of blood, razor-sharp teeth and other foul manifestations of malignant forces) make it seem as if we've seen It before and deprive the movie of some of the resonance that King must have intended.

Full of familiar King tropes, It tries to follow King's lead, allowing evil figures to provoke familiar fears of childhood. Who, at one time or another, hasn't trembled at the thought of entering a dank basement? That sort of thing.

In what can be viewed as thematic piling on, the teens of Derry not only must confront the buck-toothed Pennywise but are also taunted by the town bully (Nicholas Hamilton). Anyone who remembers his or her teen years may find Hamilton's character a good deal more frightening than any of the movie's booming effects, delivered with considerable verve and polish but too easily left behind in the theater, along with kernels of spilled popcorn.

The teens in the movie have named themselves the Losers Club. Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) leads the group. Bill's younger brother Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) is taken by Pennywise in the movie's swiftly stated prologue.

The rest of the club members mostly are distinguished by single traits. One kid (Wyatt Oleff) is Jewish; another kid (Chosen Jacobs) is black; still another (Jeremy Ray Taylor) is overweight.

Every group of screen kids needs a wise-ass. In this case, the job falls to Finn Wolfhard. Jack Dylan Grazer portrays a kid dominated by his mother.

As the story develops, a girl (Sophia Lillis) joins the pack. Lillis' Beverly has a sexually abusive father and, unfairly, has been branded as "a slut" by her classmates.

Among the movie's problems: Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard), the scary clown whose makeup and goofy affect conceal his true nature, hovers near cliche, even with his ability to transform from a clown into his horrific real self.

Having pretty much found It to be a yawn, I should hasten to say that the movie likely will add some spin to the multiplex turnstiles after a lackluster couple of late-summer weeks.

Before a preview screening of It, King appeared in a short clip addressed to the audience. He said he was happy with the adaptation and praised the movie's young cast, all of whom do fine work as they spout profanities, shriek and behave as credibly as the story allows; they also discover that their hometown is targeted by waves of violence that appear in 27-year intervals.

Sometimes, it feels as if It lumbers from one set piece to another, giving each of the teens a scene that plays to his or her major fear. Each eruption of shock creates the aura of a super-charged fun house -- vivid but depthless. And at 135 minutes, the film begins to feel as lengthy as the book.

The movie teaches the members of the Losers Club a lesson that might have been culled from Hillary Clinton's campaign slogan: "Stronger together." The monster can't win if the kids unite to overcome their fears.

Although It takes full advantage of current technology in producing its many effects, the movie nonetheless feels trapped by the well-worn demands of a genre in which nearly every move feels too ingrained to break the bounds of the screen and take up residence deep inside our worst nightmares.

Terrible secret, routine movie

Stephen King's A Good Marriage runs high on concept and low on psychological depth.

An intriguing premise isn't enough to make the movie fully credible. Instead of fearing for a wife (Joan Allen) who discovers a devastating secret about her husband (Anthony LaPaglia), we spend too much time wondering whether she's behaving in credible fashion.

Director Peter Askin presents the material in reasonably straightforward fashion, raising a bit of doubt about the sanity of Allen's Darcy. Is she right in thinking that her husband of 25 years actually is a rapist/serial killer who goes by the name "Beadie?"

The screenplay adds a bit of needed ambiguity by introducing a mysterious character (Stephen Lang) who seems to be stalking Darcy.

A Good Marriage belongs to Allen with LaPaglia chipping in what he can. He's playing Bob, a successful accountant, proud father of two grown children and a possible killer.

Neither Allen nor LaPaglia elevates material that lacks sufficient heft, and the movie turns into a bit of a tease, promising more than it delivers.

I'd call A Good Marriage a minor addition to King's big-screen oeuvre, a movie that might have been invigorated by a whopping and unexpected last-minute turn, but which fails to drum up enough dread -- or, more important, believability.