Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Shocking Truth (2000)
**** (out of 4)
This documentary from David Gregory is about as good as you could possibly hope for. In 75-minutes just about every detail on the making of the 1974 classic are covered through interviews with Tobe Hopper, Kim Henkel, Robert Kuhn, Marilyn Burns, Jim Siedow, Paul Partain and Gunnar Hansen among others.
We start off with Hopper discussing how he came up with the idea and we also get to hear about the various bad decisions that were made to get the movie in the can and many of these decisions would eventually lead the director, writer and cast to see none of the money the film would eventually make. It's clear that this wasn't a good film to be working on because of the tight schedule, incredibly hot Texas temperatures and the fact that many scenes inside the house had real animal carcases being used and this here didn't smell too well after being in the sun all day.
We learn about the troubles Siedow had beating Burns with a real broom and how the infamous dinner scene took over twenty-four hours of straight shooting. It's clear from everyone involved that this was an incredibly difficult time to be shooting and things didn't get any better after the movie was released because many people were robbed by the Mafia who turned out to be the ones releasing it to theaters? The film covers some of the controversy that hit the film overseas including Britain where it was banned.
The first hour takes a look at the original film while the other fifteen-minutes looks at the three sequels. It could be said that the sequels themselves deserve their own documentaries considering all the trouble that stalked them but Hopper does go over the butcher job Cannon done on part two and there's discussion of New Line wrecking the third film only to then have Columbia stop the fourth one from being released. It's rather amazing to hear how much trouble these four films had.
THE SHOCKING TRUTH does contain quite a bit of shock but fans of the series will certainly want to check this out as it contains a lot of great material and thankfully the majority of the cast members are on hand to share their stories.
