The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Synopsis: En route to visit their grandfather's grave (which has apparently been ritualistically desecrated), five teenagers drive past a slaughterhouse, pick up (and quickly drop) a sinister hitch-hiker, eat some delicious home-cured meat at a roadside gas station, before ending up at the old family home... where they're plunged into a never-ending nightmare as they meet a family of cannibals who more than make up in power tools what they lack in social skills...
Genre: Horror
Director(s): Tobe Hooper
Production: Bryanston Pictures
  1 win & 1 nomination.
 
IMDB:
7.5
Metacritic:
75
Rotten Tomatoes:
88%
NOT RATED
Year:
1974
83 min
1,643 Views


It is believed that

the indictment is only one of a series

to be handed down as the result of

a special grand jury investigation.

Graverobbing in Texas

is this hour's top news story.

An informant led officers of the Muerto

County Sheriff's Department to a cemetery

just outside the small rural Texas

community of Newt early this morning.

Officers there discovered

what appeared to be a grisly work of art,

the remains of a badly decomposed body

wired to a large monument.

A second body was found in a ditch

near the perimeter of the cemetery.

Subsequent investigation has revealed

at least a dozen empty crypts,

and it's feared more will turn up

as the probe continues.

Deputies report that in some instances,

only parts of a corpse had been removed,

the head or in some cases

the extremities removed,

the remainder of the corpse left intact.

Evidence indicates the robberies

have occurred over a period of time.

Sheriff Jesus Maldonado refused

to give details of the ghoulish case

and said only that

he did have strong evidence

linking the crime to elements

outside the state.

Area residents have reportedly converged

on the cemetery,

fearing the remains of relatives

have been removed.

No suspects are in custody, as

the investigation at the scene continues.

Oil storage units

continue to burn out of control

at the huge Texaco refinery

near the Texas-Louisiana border.

Three storage units exploded

into flames during the night,

killing at least three workers

and injuring a dozen more.

Fire-fighting units in three Texas cities

continue to battle the holocaust,

in an effort to confine 40-foot flames.

Smoke from the fire is visible to Houston

residents some 60 miles to the south.

Health officials in San Francisco

reluctantly admit

they may have a cholera epidemic

on their hands.

Some 40 cases of the highly infectious

disease have been confirmed.

...is responsible for spread of the disease.

Houston police are puzzled over

an outbreak of violence

apparently touched off by a suicide.

A young man, reportedly angered by a

local television blackout of a sports event,

jumped from the tenth-story window

of his apartment.

A second man allegedly threatened to

leap to his death from the same window,

but was restrained by police.

Witnesses to the incident

reportedly heard the man jump...

She offered no explanation for the attack.

The lieutenant was treated for minor

wounds at the hospital and released.

A 16-story building under construction

in downtown Atlanta collapsed today,

killing at least 29 persons.

The engineering firm responsible for

the structural design of the building

could offer no explanation for the collapse.

The construction firm says

there's no logical reason for the collapse

and suspects sabotage.

Police in Gary, Indiana,

have been unable to identify

the bodies of a young man and woman...

...stab wounds

and their features carved away.

The man's genitals had been removed,

and police first identified the victims

as two women.

OK?

Franklin!

Ah!

- Are you OK?

- I was... Sh*t.

OK.

This heat is just driving me crazy.

I don't know if I can take much more.

Listen, the condition of retrogradation

is contrary or inharmonious to

the regular direction

of actual movement in the zodiac

and is, in that respect, evil.

Hence, when malefic planets

are in retrograde -

and Saturn's malefic, OK? -

their maleficence is increased.

Have you been doing

those word power columns?

It just means that Saturn's a bad influence.

It's just particularly a bad influence now

because it's in retrograde.

- You believe that stuff she's hawking me?

- I don't know.

My granddaddy's buried here.

Did anything happen to him?

- What's your granddaddy's name?

- That big feller

at the stand with that flashlight in his hand,

that's the sheriff.

You tell him your granddaddy's

buried in there.

- He'll let you in.

- Thank you.

I'm gonna run off with your girl a minute.

Honey, I'll get you the sheriff.

Let us through.

This girl's granddaddy's buried here.

Been in there the whole time,

unbeknownst to Clyde.

Clyde didn't know, either.

They didn't know why...

Things happen hereabout

they don't tell about.

I see things.

You see, they say

it's just an old man talking.

You laugh at an old man.

There's them that laughs and knows better.

They're sure. The man said they

could tell if the grave had been dug up.

Franklin, don't worry. I saw it myself.

It didn't look dug up to me.

- Oh, what's that?

- What smells?

What is that stench?

Roll up the window.

Hey, that's the old slaughterhouse.

That's where Grandpa used to

sell his cattle.

We got an uncle that works at one of

those places outside of Ft. Worth.

That's where they kill them. They bash

them in the head with a sledgehammer.

- That's awful.

- It usually wouldn't kill 'em on the first lick.

They'd start squealing and freaking out,

and they'd have to bash 'em three times.

They'd skin them sometimes

before they were even dead.

That's horrible.

People shouldn't kill animals for food.

They don't do it like that anymore.

Now they got this big gun that shoots

a bolt into their skull, then retracts it.

It's just boom! It goes boom!

And boom!

Franklin, I like meat.

Please change the subject.

- Boom!

- That's terrible. It's still going on.

Oh, man, it's hot in here.

- Hitchhiker.

- Should we pick him up?

- Yeah. He'll asphyxiate out there.

- What does he look like?

Son of a b*tch is gonna

smell like a slaughterhouse.

Oh, give the guy a break.

He can sit by Franklin.

- What do you want to do?

- He's weird-looking.

- Pick him up, man.

- No!

Well, I think we just picked up Dracula.

- Where you headed, man?

- South.

You work at that place?

Oh, no.

- How did you get stuck way out here?

- I was at the slaughterhouse.

- My uncle works for the slaughterhouse.

- My brother worked there.

My-my grandfather too.

My family's always been in meat.

A whole family of Draculas.

Hey, man, did you go

in that slaughter room?

Where they shoot the cattle

with that big air gun?

- Oh, that-that-that gun's no good.

- I was in there once with my uncle.

The old way with a sledge.

See, that was better.

They died better that way.

How come? I thought the gun was better.

Oh, no, no.

With the new way,

the people are put out of jobs.

You do that?

Look.

- I was the killer.

- Damn.

- Let me see them.

- They don't send the heads away.

- You took these, huh?

- Yeah.

Franklin.

See, they make head cheese.

They...

they take the head,

and they boil it,

except for the tongue,

and they scrape all the flesh

away from the bone.

They use everything.

They don't throw nothing way.

They use the jowls

and the muscles and the eyes

and ligaments and everything.

- Oh.

- Look at this.

The nose and the gums and all the flesh,

and they boil it down into a big jelly of fat.

Wow. I didn't know

that's what was in that stuff.

It's really good. You like it?

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Kim Henkel

Kim David Henkel (born January 19, 1946) is an American screenwriter, director, producer, and actor. He is best known as the co-writer of Tobe Hooper's horror film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. more…

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Submitted on August 05, 2018

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