'Chain Reactions' Review
Director Alexandre O. Philippe looks at the legacy of 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre' through the commentary of five artists impacted by the horror classic.
The best kind of film studies discourse, for me, analyzes a movie that I wouldn’t otherwise think about. I have no interest in ever rewatching The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, as it’s not my cup of tea. However, I do appreciate others’ love for the horror classic and am interested in seeing or hearing arguments for why it’s a masterpiece. I will also watch any documentary by Alexandre O. Philippe, who has elevated the cinematic film essay with such features as 78/52, Lynch/Oz, and Memory: The Origins of Alien. With Chain Reactions, he makes me care about Leatherface and family.
The film tackles the legacy of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre through interviews with five people inspired by the 1974 original. Each interview is given its own chapter, structuring Chain Reactions like an anthology. And as is the case with all anthology films, some parts are better than others. The documentary peaks with its first part, in which Patton Oswalt stays focused on the movie at hand, offering several insightful points about the way it was shot while also centering his discussion around personal memories of the movie and his reasons for connecting it to Nosferatu. Filmmaker Karyn Kusama is the final interview and the only other one I’d call completely engaging. She gets it, as in the film and the assignment here.
The other three are filmmaker Takashi Miike, author Stephen King, and critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. I blame my disinterest in Miike’s own movies as part of why I was bored during his section. King, I think, gets too off track too often. Heller-Nicholas does have a lot of good things to say, but she primarily comes at the material through a particular geographic perspective that I found unrelatable. Collectively, though, they add up to show how films reach us all in different ways depending on our points of view, feelings, and contexts of viewing them.