Let’s talk about people talking about Texas Chainsaw Massacre, fifty-one years old next week. (October 11th, 1974.)

This is an odd documentary. I definitely appreciated the approach. If you’re in the know about ‘saw—to where you know to call it ‘saw—you probably know all of the behind-the-scenes stuff. The heat, the danger, the madness of it all. And if not, Tobe Hooper’s director commentary is still around and great listening. And if that’s not enough, there’s Joe Bob Briggs’ 10,000 word essay for Texas Monthly magazine, which he’s turning into a full-length book.

So, sure, tell me how other artists have been influenced by it. Oh, three out of five are raging leftists? Well, we’ll be fine as long as they stick to the movie.

Patton Oswalt

The movie begins with an extensive interview with Patton Oswalt. This is kind of amusing from the standpoint of “When you think horror, you think Patton Oswalt.” It’s quite fun, because Oswalt’s just a fan boy. He says he’s seen ‘saw thirty times, and you can buy that. He’s calling out the little details that make the movie great (and also would be a little hokey if they were more pronounced, like the “arm chair”) and he’s drawing comparisons to Nosferatu (1922), which are probably a little strained but not too bad. And also Gone With The Wind—in particular when Rhett “rapes” Scarlett, comparing it to Leatherface grabs Pam off the porch.

And he’s doing a little bit of just jerkin’ off, which, honestly, is fine in this context. We’re not looking for serious scholarship, really, and maybe ‘saw really is an apocalyptic film where the evil sun has driven everyone insane, and the Final Girl is going to escape the house only to discover the whole world has gone mad.

Good enthusiasm and genuine love of the film.

Takashi Miike

The second interview is terrific, too. Takashi (First Love, Rinne) claims that he was off to see City Limits, the Charlie Chaplin classic, and the showing was sold out. Rather than waste a trip into town, he decides to go see The Devil’s Sacrifice  (TCM’s Japanese title) instead, on the premise that it might a pink film (Japan’s softcore erotica genre). He gets something entirely different, of course.

In the great quote from the doc:

For the first time, I felt that movies could be something dangerous. As I watched the film, the characters became more endearing. I started to feel affection for them. By the end, I was rooting for them and laughing out loud.

Neat. Miike is one of these Japanese directors with over a hundred credits to his name, most famously Ichi The Killer, Audition and 13 Assassins, and his take on ‘saw is interesting and amusing. If you’ve seen any of his horror, you’ve probably noticed how much you tend to identify (very uncomfortably) with the monsters.

He shot his first movies in 16mm and blew them up, because that’s how ‘saw was shot and he liked the effect. According to Takashi, Japanese filmmakers were excited by the film, but couldn’t really imitate it: They needed their own native genre (J-Horror, of course).

He also reiterates the theme I’ve heard many times from Japanese people: This movie made Japanese people think Texas was very dangerous.

And he never did see City Limits.

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Third up was Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Yeah, I didn’t know who she was either, but turns out she’s a horror documentarian. A scholar, if you will, of various genres and subgenres that comprise horror. She has a feminine bent, writing (e.g.) 1000 Women In Horror, and she talks a bit about the gatekeeping that she experienced growing up. ‘saw was an older boy thing, but when she saw it, she loved it.

Also, she’s Australian, a country ‘saw was banned in for a decade. When she finally saw the film it was a worn tape made from a worn print and, like Oswalt, she comments on how that graininess was integral to the experience, the danger, the idea of watching something forbidden.

Now, I’m gonna interject here and say, I, too, saw a grainy VHS of ‘saw for my first experience and it left me “meh”. There’s an extended scene of Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) chasing Sally (Marilyn Burns) through the desert chaparral in near pitch blackness, and on an 18″ screen (if it was even that big), I couldn’t see a damn thing.

When I took my kids to see the restoration in a movie theater, I found that one of the most gripping moments of the movie, like a horror version of Lawrence of Arabia‘s long desert shot.

Anyway, Heller-Nicholas was interesting, particularly in how she related ‘saw to the Australian experience. Parts of Texas and the Outback have a lot in common, and she made the obvious (to horror fans if not American general audiences) connection to Wolf Creek, as well as some interesting and more obscure connections to Australian films like Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and 1971’s Wake In Fright, which predates ‘saw but seems to foreshadow it as well.

It was a refreshing take, like Miike’s, on otherwise well-traveled ground,

Stephen King

And then this guy shows up. Now, I’m not the biggest King fan, but he knows horror. And I will credit him this much: He doesn’t bring up politics. He is the only one of the five who swore at all, and he did so profusely and tediously. (You know, writers are good with words and all.)

The problem is, he brings up lots of things, and doesn’t even do an Oswalt reach, tying whatever it is he’s rambling on about back to ‘saw. We hear about the camera on the 2x4s from Evil Dead and how he got hit by a van and Joe (who seems like a good son, quite apart from being a good writer) brought in a video setup and they watched Blair Witch Project, which is also a low-budget horror movie unlike The Shining which is “cold” and overpriced. You know he has to bring up The Shining, because it’s the best horror adaptation of his work precisely because it inverts his self-centered worldview.

Oh, right: ‘saw. We were talking about ‘saw, ostensibly.

I get it: You get King for your horror doc, you gotta showcase him. Even if he’s rambling. But unlike the first three interviewees, one never gets the sense that he’s a fan of ‘saw—it’s just another flick in an unending stream of horror content. I haven’t read much King, maybe a dozen books, but I’ve never seen anything really ‘saw-like in his work, and if it had influenced him, this would’ve been the time to mention it.

He knew Tobe Hooper personally, but apparently only to the extent of both having cameos in Sleepwalkers.

There’s a scene in King’s Maximum Overdrive where had the SFX crew put a water balloon full of blood in front of a steamroller (rolling over a child), and the balloon exploded, spattering everyone. King (“coked out of my mind”) loved the shot, which was ultimately censored. I had always heard he loved the shot so much he sent a picture to Hooper, but he doesn’t mention that here. (I’m probably remembering wrong. He might have sent it to George Romero, but Romero was allegedly doing most of the direction on Overdrive while King was in rehab.)

Anyway, the only place this ramble gets interesting is when the (usually unheard, off-screen interviewer) asks about the social/moral implications of horror, and King says something to the effect of, that’s not the artist’s domain. The problem of what people should or shouldn’t see is a problem for censors.

This is immediately followed up with a story about how Rage, one of the Bachman books, may well have inspired a school shooting, so King stopped republication of that book.

Well. I guess this is interesting, but is it germane? Has ‘saw inspired a lot of copycats?

A big wasted opportunity. You could’ve put Joe Bob Briggs here or, hell, you could put me here, and I could’ve done better.

But things were about to get much worse.

Karyn Kusama

If I understood Karyn Kusama correctly, she’s seen ‘saw twice, the second time in preparation for this documentary. In the first breath, she uses the words “privilege” and “patriarchy” and I got up to take The Wiz. (The Boy filled me in; I missed nothing.)

Kusama directed the spectacular flops Aeon Flux and Jennifer’s Body—neither of which may be her fault—before directing the creepy, modestly budgeted horror The Invitation. Unlike Oswalt’s fan-boying reaches, Kusama’s reach is in service of The Message.

For example, she says Tobe Hooper was looking fifty years into the future. I get that she was a grade-schooler in the ’70s, but Hooper was looking squarely into the present. ‘saw came out a couple of months after Nixon resigned. We had gas rationing. We had radical leftists bombing things. We had mainstream porn. We had stagflation. There’s a reason Joe Bob Briggs says this is the first true counter-culture picture.

And here Ms. Kusama says everybody’s privileged. The white kids—you know, the ones about to be brutally murdered—are privileged because they get to take a van to visit a house in the middle of nowhere that one has inherited. The cannibals are privileged because they expect to be able to keep their jobs as slaughterhouse killers.

As opposed to Miike who came in sympathizing with the normies and left sympathizing with the monsters, Kusama is above the whole thing.

She’s on record as saying it’s a great arthouse film, but she’s on record as having seen Reds fifteen times. As a Brooklyn-born film-school graduate, Kusama might look in the mirror for privilege.

Much like King, she didn’t actually have much to add to the conversation. Speaking of wasted opportunities, you could put a good parodist here and gotten something that was at least amusingly insufferable.

But Apart From That…

On the three-point documentary scale:

1. Subject matter is fine. It’s very fun in parts, even when it goes off the rails turning attention to detail into deeper meanings.
2. The presentation is kind of cool. For a movie that’s basically talking heads, there are some nice shots and cinematographer Robert Muratore (Cannibal! The Musical) puts more care into the proceedings than some narrative films I’ve seen lately. Editor David Lawrence keeps things tight. Composer John Hegel—who also worked on Cannibal! The Musical—sets the mood well.
3. Slant? Pro-‘saw. How could it be otherwise? Hacky, sophomoric Marxism aside, 80% of the movie is on point. Would it be interesting to do a “pros” and “cons” of ‘saw? Maybe, but it seems unlikely to happen.

Director Alexandre O. Philippe seems to be a movie geek, with a collection of documentaries under his belt, some of which occasionally have broken through the general consciousness. The People vs. George Lucas and Lynch/Oz are very fan-oriented, but I think his strongest work is deep-dives into iconic moments, like 78/52 which is entirely about the Psycho shower scene. Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on the Exorcist is one that gets played and replayed in theaters here a lot.

An interesting thing to me was how much the same scenes kept coming up. The meathook scene (which is not at all graphic—the whole movie is largely implication), the porch scene, the first kill, etc. (Again, one way you can tell Oswalt’s a fan is that he brings up scenes nobody else does.)

And of course, the ass scene is as iconic a scene as there is. I mentioned in my review of Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D how I’d walked into a theater in the early ’00s and saw a trailer of Jessica Alba’s butt and said “Oh, they remade Texas Chainsaw Massacre!” I recently learned Hooper loved that butt…er…trailer.

Anyway, I can sorta recommend this. If you’re a fan and have lots of fan friends, you’re probably going to be able to have your own interesting conversation about it, but even if you have your own Oswalt, you probably don’t have your own Miike or Heller-Nicholas. You can turn it off when King shows up.

If I said to you The Long Walk is a good film—for boomer fascist fantasy torture porn, would you forget the first part of the sentence by the time you got to the end?

I’ve been thinking a lot these days about what I call “The Buy-In”. The Buy-In is the hurdle an artist has to get over to get the audience to “buy in” to the story. All narrative forms of art have this. (It’s true of all forms art, really, but for now we’re talking narratives.)

For example, I exchanged tweets with a guy a few weeks back where he trashed Weapons, and his review contained something to the effect of how he basically couldn’t buy supernatural elements. Not just Weapons supernatural elements, but any supernatural elements.

No buy-in.

As a big fan of “Mystery Science Theater 3000”, “Rifftrax” and “372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back,” and of riffing on movies before those things existed, I can affirm that an entire class of jokes exists solely on refusing to buy-in. (And the degree to which a person will find that funny? Also a matter of buying in to the meta-commentary premise!)

Why all the throat clearing before getting to the review?

Because The Long Walk is a pretty good movie that slaps you in the face with dumb and basically dares you to keep buying in.

What’s It All About, Stevie?

The premise is that in an alt-history USA—from the look of things sometime in the early ’60s, but more on that in a second—had a war and is on hard financial times, and also fascist. And they’ve decided to remedy these hard financial times by having a bunch of people walk a long distance, murdering them as they go. (Step 3: Profit!)

So, The Running Man but slower. And with no glitz. Or spandex. Or any of the fun, campy stuff of the ’80s movie.

Every year, there’s a lottery. Fifty men are chosen to do the walk. They must walk at a minimum of 3mph, or they get a warning. After three warnings, their armed escort will shoot them. The last survivor is given all the money and a wish. (An addition from the screenwriters—even Stephen King wouldn’t do something as a dumb as “you get a wish”. OK, I take that back, he totally would, but he didn’t think of it.)

Our opening scene has the protagonist, Garraty (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son, Cooper Hoffman) bidding farewell to his tearful mother (Jane Greer), in a scene that makes it clear that the walk is voluntary and that Something Bad happened to Papa Garraty.

We have a lot of questions at this point, and those questions are answered by The Major, who is played by Mark Hamill. The last Stephen King movie we saw, The Life of Chuck, also featured Hamill as an old (Jewish?) grandfather and it was the best role I’d ever seen him do.

This is possibly the worst role I’ve ever seen him do, though it’s not really his fault. The Major is Stephen King’s idea of what an American caudillo would be like, and he’s so cartoonishly dumb, he knocks you out of the movie every time you see him. (I believe King wrote this story initially in the ’60s, and it has that kind of groovy, anti-American feel, even though the scriptwriter obviously changed plenty of elements of the story.)

[This is going to be a spoiler-y review, but I assure you, there are no surprises in this film, unless maybe you read the novel and expect it to hew to that strictly.]

Here Be Spoilers

OK, I’m willing to buy into the nonsense, even though the movie is already defeating its own premise, as members of this long walk start by flipping off cops. At a later point, one of the characters holds up a radio playing, presumably, rebellious music to raise morale, and the viewer is left to wonder what sort of fascist state this is that allows open defiance to the extent of radio stations being allowed to play, I don’t know, rock ‘n’ roll or whatever. (This, and all the in-narrative music is disastrous. Obviously there’s an attempt to recreate the Mozart record scene in Shawshank or any number of anti-authority music scenes in other films, but it’s all cringe.)

One of the characters is writing a book about the walk, because that will “sell big,” meaning there’s some sort of publishing industry that one can get into, and be successful in. But of course, he also has to win the walk, ’cause otherwise he’s dead. And if he wins, he wouldn’t need the money from a book.

So, you have this dubious vehicle through which you can explore peoples’ stories, but every time you start buying in, dumb things happen, which then draw your attention to the ongoing dumb things.

Like, they all have backpacks. But they can also call for food and water at any time. Why would you carry any freakin’ thing? You wouldn’t. On the first day, you’d throw it off, or it would end up abrading your skin away.

Ask me how I know. In fact, my lifelong experience with walking made me wonder if Stephen King or anyone in the film had ever walked before*. Like, I will, on a lark, get up and walk five miles carrying a backpack weighing 40 pounds or more. When I go to BasedCon in Grand Rapids, I walk the three miles to the hotel with a backpack and a bag of books.

I will often do these things without wearing shoes. I don’t prepare, I don’t hydrate, I don’t carry snacks. I’ve done it since I was a kid, walking miles through 100 degree heat, and not wearing shoes.

My life was not at stake, however. Had it been at stake—if, in fact, I had a choice of walking to the utmost of my ability or dying, I would have prepared.

I mention this because, despite the stakes, nobody in this movie is acting like they’re about to die—and it’s a statistical certainty that they are.

98% Dumb

The Major exists as comic relief here, giving speeches that a college-age hippie thinks a military leader in a police state would give, and you could see this as a grueling training event to promote camaraderie, except that instead of building teamwork through a grueling adventure, they’re just gonna murder everyone. On live TV. And it’s going to—I’m not making this up—boost the GDP.

Then the walk begins and people drop out almost immediately. The kid—I mean, he’s war movie cliché #1 “The Kid” so you know he’s gotta die first—gets a Charley horse, and he’s out. And by out I mean we’re treated to a close-up of his head being blown-off by a soldier in the escort.

’cause, like, that’s real man.

Somebody’s gotta tell these Boomers that Vietnam is over, and the Asians are all going capitalist now because socialism is for dunces.

Actually, I shouldn’t blame Boomers. Director Francis Lawrence (of The Hunger Games, which this is very evocative of) and writer JT Mollner (who wrote and directed last year’s terrific Strange Darling) are both Xers. I don’t know, maybe this is all supposed to be ironic.

Oh, the word “ironic” is used to describe something that’s not even slightly “ironic”. Alanna Morissette, what has thou wrought?

Anyway, it’s the first of many gory scenes which struck me as porn for people who fantasize about America turning into a right-wing fascist state. Like, I’m trying to enjoy the drama about these 50 guys who are acting like they’re not about to die, and the movie’s, like, “Hey, no, this is serious.” (One guy gets his legs run over by a half-track which is a Vietnam war movie trope.)

Anyway, the kid, “Curly” (and I am not making that up) is just the first of many to die within the first few hours of the walk. (The Boy and I saw this right before we did our seven-hour walk at Knott’s, amusingly enough.)

Things settle down a bit and we get some drama between the characters, some backstory, some motivation, and we learn things like everyone volunteers to be in the walk lottery because it’s the only way to succeed in life.

Everyone volunteers, but apparently only two of the fifty actually prepare for it. One of them is a nerdy Asian dude who—

Diversity Is Our What Now?

Wait, a brief interlude: This is the second movie based on a Stephen King story (after Life of Chuck) where we have a United Colors of Benetton cast and…it’s just fine. Like, the acting is good, nobody brings up race, and everybody gets to have a human story. I generally approve, except that it 1) it’s dumb like the new Star Wars movies having a diverse Evil Empire; 2) it resulted in an amusingly awkward Stephen King trope; 3) it meant I knew the ending well in advance.

Ironically—I think this genuinely is ironic—the original story is just white dudes and the alterations they made not only added persons of color, it made the main black guy into a magical negro. Seriously, McVries (David Jonsson) is the only one among them who has no noticeable issues the whole walk, although he says he had “jelly legs” when another walker complains of them, and he’s constantly saving the protagonist Garraty (Cooper Hoffman).

When I recognized the pattern, I realized how the ending had to go.

We’re getting backstory as we walk, and this is the best part of the movie: You see camaraderie and humanity in a way that possibly makes slightly more sense than The Hunger Games, and you’re rooting for them even though the story has told you right up front that they’re going to die.

Then we get Garraty’s backstory and, well, we literally laughed. Turns out, he’s in the walk because The Major personally came to his house and murdered his father for saying the wrong thing.

Buckle Up: It’s Gonna Get Sillier

This is some quality fascism here. We could estimate the population of the USA during this fantasy time period as being between 100 and 200 million. There’s no Internet, obviously. Hell, there’s not even FM radio from what I can tell. The highest tech is a digital watch that measures speed.

But The Major takes time out to personally go kill Papa Garraty. And why? Because he talks about “the old ways” and reads Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Camus.

Now, look, we’re supposed to buy in to the fascist America fantasy and I was doing my best, and then this happened.

I appreciate the problem here. You can’t say he read Das Kapital because some people are gonna say “Well, I guess he had it coming” and also you agree with Marx, at least for career purposes. And you can’t say The Bible, because your producers aren’t gonna like that, even though it maps pretty neatly to actual world events We Don’t Talk About.

Anyway, all Papa has to do to get out of it is take a loyalty oath. But, no, he opts for death.

And so we discover that Garraty’s big plan is, when he gets to the end of the walk, for his wish he’s going to ask for a carbine, and then he’s gonna shoot The Major with it.

Once again, I am not making this up.

There Are Dozens Of Us! Dozens!

The Killed-For-Camus thing raised another issue: Who is this movie for? Besides referencing some philosophers few people have read, there are a couple of songs. What songs? Well, Garraty’s mother (Jane Greer) sings “Molly Malone” and the troop rouses around a chorus of “My Darling Clementine”.

Finger. On the pulse. (This movie has made $20M now, and I think everyone involved owes the marketing department lunch. And at a nice place, like Jerry’s, not some Chili’s crap.)

Well, we get some good drama and find out McVries’ backstory, and he’s just in the race because he…I don’t know, wanted to go for a walk or something…his motivation is mystical, like he wanted to do it to help out Garraty (whom he of course had never met). He just plans to stop walking at some point.

There are a couple of villains, which you know instantly because they’re blond white guys. (Amusingly, this isn’t really on King because everyone is white in the novel.) One is literally psychotic and takes out the gay guy through provocation.

I mean, he doesn’t say he’s the gay guy but he’s very “gay coded” as the kids say, and the psychotic kid has a southern drawl sometimes, so you know he’s about as evil as he can be. (The Major occasionally has a drawl, too.)

Southern kid provokes gay kid, who takes a swing at him, because you know it’s not like you’re going to die if you slow down. Southern kid ends up being ostracized and wracked with guilt and also hitting himself like someone just off his meds.

(This whole bit was a major disappointment since the Southern kid gets ostracized right off the bat for saying “mee-maw”. Instead of bonding with everyone else, he just gets increasingly alienated. Hacky.)

Pooperation

As the walk wears on, you just can’t help but notice how much it seems like these guys were just kidnapped and dumped on Route 1. For example, there is extensive pooping, including near fatal and fatal pooping. (And we get to see it all, in living color, because it’s real man.)

Because if you knew you were going on a six-day walk, it’s not like you’d give yourself an enema beforehand. You’d just hold on to that stuff knowing you’d be risking your life later on.

Garraty’s shoes give out on day six. Because there wouldn’t be a whole industry devoted to making shoes that would last six days. Not just shoes, but foot wrappings so your feet didn’t get irritated. (Normal socks will do that after a while.)

There’d be training camps, there’d be equipment, there’d be folk wisdom, there’d be cottage industries built around it. But we have to have everyone be dumb victims.

It’s really an awful slander of America and Americans. People are better prepared for “Jeopardy” than this.

As they walk along, their armed escort gets increasingly bored and as quick as you can say “When I world build, I don’t really think things through”, the walkers grab at the guns. The only one who gets away with it, though, is a guy acting completely bonkers at the end of the race whom the soldiers are ignoring, I guess because they have to divide their attention between all six of the remaining walkers. (That’s sarcasm!)

When he gets the gun, he shoots the guy who was holding it, but not the guy on top of the mobile gun who’s five feet from him and armed. Instead he, I dunno, whoops or something.

Plot Twist(s)

The big plot twist—I think it’s supposed to be a plot twist, anyway—is that the other blond kid is the son of The Major. This is shown in the opening sequence, but not spelled out, and The Boy missed it so maybe it’s just ’cause I’m old that it was plain as day. And—this is from the book—the idea is that he’s “the rabbit”.

They’re the dogs at a race track and he’s the rabbit. Well, he’s never in the front, and he’s not a robot, and his only thing is that he’s slightly more knowledgeable about the walk but not in any meaningful way that impacts anything.

Also, he wears a neckerchief. You know what you wouldn’t wear on a 300 mile walk? A neckerchief, or any other garment that might chafe.

In the end, McVries saves Garraty one last time, but then Garraty goes down and gives McVries the win. (Like they would have a black man sacrifice himself for a white man in 2025.)

McVries then wishes for a carbine. The Major insists a guard give it to him and McVries shoots him. (And walks off into the rain unimpeded.)

Other Than That, Mrs. Lincoln…

So, so dumb. But otherwise, a good movie.

The acting is good. Some of the dialogue is poorly articulated which would’ve bothered me more if I thought it mattered. Hoffman is the son of the late Seymour Philip Hoffman and he’s good, but he’s sorta doughy in the way of his dad, and I gotta say, by day six he hasn’t lost a bit of weight. (The Boy’s theory is that they didn’t want to make the walkers look as crappy as they really would.)

A couple of the shots are chaotically edited in a way that didn’t work for me. Opening music sounds like it could’ve been from The Life of Chuck, interestingly, but the composer is primarily known for The Hunger Games.

I didn’t regret watching it, but the dumbness kept coming back at me for the rest of the night, and I was at the Knott’s Halloween Haunt. The Boy started laughing because I’d start a sentence with “Another thing about that walking movie…”

These guys can do better, and I hope they do in the future.

* Of course, Stephen King was famously walking when he got hit by a car, so I guess he has some experience.