As much as any surrealist arthouse flick, Texas Chain Saw feels like a nightmare made real, an inescapable but entirely authentic vision of pure hell.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 12, 2024

What makes it so terrifying is how awfully real it all feels.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Oct 25, 2024

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre brings genuine horror back to the cinema. Be warned: its Gothic realism reminds us how rarely screen mayhem actually evokes real fear and revulsion in these times when "murder by numbers" is an everyday news item.

| Sep 30, 2024

Everything about the film is inept. Two of the girls get a chance to do a lot of screaming. I could have screamed, too, for wasting my time.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Sep 30, 2024

Besides pandering to the worst kind of sadistic taste, "Massacre" is just plain bad.

| Sep 30, 2024

The foreground becomes comically absurd in its congested derivation of gags to make our flesh creep. So the film is neither sickening nor thrilling nor artistically interesting.

| Sep 30, 2024

The movie chloroforms sensitivity, has no point to make, is so exultant about disease and fright that you're finally forced to question the morality of the moviemakers.

| Sep 30, 2024

No other later horror film captured so well the strangeness of living through a long night of evil and emerging into bright sunlight, with its tacit promise of restorative justice or virtue, or just normality.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 13, 2024

A despicable film about five young people traveling through the desolate flatlands of Texas who seek refuge in a mansion... Craziness handled without sensitivity is a degrading, senseless, misuse of film and time.

| Sep 14, 2022

This movie is nothing but an exercise in tension. Grotesque, looming, filthy tension -- and on that count, the film works extremely well.

| Original Score: A- | Oct 9, 2020

Morally retrograde it may be, but then so are nightmares. The point is that this one, though often crude and raw, really leads the imagination. What also works in its favour is that it doesn't pretend to do anything more than scare the pants off you.

| Apr 7, 2015

This abattoir of a movie boasts sledgehammers, meathooks and chainsaws, and the result, though not especially visceral, is noisy, relentless, and about as subtle as having your leg sawed off without anaesthetic.

| Oct 14, 2014

As disgusting, harrowing, and ugly as the 1974 horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is, the film has moments of eerie beauty.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 22, 2014

Chainsaw-wielding Leatherface remains one of the most disturbing characters in horror.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 9, 2012

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre doesn't try anything funny, there are no winks to the audience. And it's all the better because of it.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 19, 2010

The violence is outdated by today's standards, but the original Chainsaw still packs a punch with its rough look and disturbing overtones.

| Sep 19, 2007

The picture gets to you more through its intensity than its craft, but Hooper does have a talent.

| Sep 19, 2007

Despite the heavy doses of gore in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Tobe Hooper's pic is well-made for an exploiter of its type.

| Sep 19, 2007

The movie is some kind of weird, off-the-wall achievement. I can't imagine why anyone would want to make a movie like this, and yet it's well-made, well-acted, and all too effective.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 3, 2006

...the only other film to truly capture that uniquely unsettling promise of Romero's first zombie epic was Tobe Hooper's absolutely perverted directorial debut...

| May 24, 2003