The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: A Family Portrait

Despite not liking much of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise I went into this looking forward to some background on the film, some behind the scenes factoids and a further look into the movie.

After this hour long documentary had finished I wasn't really much wiser.

Essentially the same couple of stories are repeated, the titbits provided are really quite petty and the cast do not come across well.

What I mean by that is they aren't exactly good interviews, most of the cast come across as pretentious and make out that TCM was the greatest movie ever made.

I would say this is for huge fans only, the likelihood of learning anything new however is pretty remote.

The Good:

Gunnar Hansen

The Bad:

Hugely repetitious

Some poor audio recording quality

Shoddily made

Rather dull

Things I Learnt From This Documentary:

For appearance sake it's probably best you don't admit to enjoying hitting a woman on set

Admitting you wrote a topless scene just because you wanted to see an actresses boobs isn't much better

The things the actors say are interesting, too bad Shellady didnt film them in any sort of interesting way. talking head, talking head, talking head... Ed Neal's shot is blurry, Seidow comes off like hes in a nursing home, and Dugans cat steals his scenes from him. Would have been nice to get comments from Henkel or someone else behind the scenes. a lot of stuff got repeated (OK! IT WAS HOT WHEN YOU FILMED THE DINNER SCENE!!!) but otherwise it was interesting. See if someone transcripted it, it'll beat watching it.

This is sort of a hard one to find now but well worth the trouble. Here are interviews with the actors that portrayed the maniacal family in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I was amazed at how the disturbing character of the hitchiker is now a comedian! He's actually quite funny as he goes into detail about the rigors of filming. Gunnar also recounts scenes such as the dinner scene and how horrible it was to shoot. See it.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: A Family Portrait is a documentary interviewing the `Family' of actors who played the cannibal clan in the classic 1974 film.

Plainly presented by director Brad Shellady featuring interviews of Gunnar Hansen, Edwin Neal, John Dugan and the late Jim Siedow we see them tell many fun and interesting tales of their experiences during the filming of and after the release of the influential film. Shot on video the documentary really lacks many things. They should have included more behind-the-scenes details from all the actors and crew but then I guess it wouldn't be a `family portrait'.

Suspiria10 give it a C+.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: A Family Portrait (1988)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

John Dugan (Grandpa), Jim Siedow (The Cook), Edwin Neal (The Hitchhiker) and Gunner Hansen (Leatherface) are interviewed for this rather interesting documentary that takes a look at the making of THE Texas CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and gives us the stories from the actual cannibal family seen in the movie.

This documentary was quite popular when it was first released and it's even better today since two of the members have sadly passed away. Getting to hear these stories is certainly something special and I especially like the fact that all of the attention is given to the family. Each man talks about how they ended up getting their roles and then we get into the production of the film. A lot of discussion goes towards how brutal the shooting was and this includes the horrid smells during the dinner scene as well as the abuse that they had to put on the actress.

At just a hour there are plenty of great stories told here so fans of the film will certainly enjoy this.