Chain Reactions honors Texas massacre

          Long ago I walked out of a theater after a midnight screening feeling like I just stayed awake through a nightmare, never imagining that decades down the line a documentary about that same movie would resonate with my sense of cinematic history. One of the documentary’s interview subjects, actor and comedian Patton Oswalt, jokes about the film in a routine claiming it has the best and most accurate title ever: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. To quote him, “When you hear that title in your brain you see a free movie in your head.” And the title of a documentary about that groundbreaking horror film? Pretty good too: Chain Reactions. Writer-director Alexandre O. Phillippe gathers five movie and horror experts to give their feelings about why the chainsaw cut its way into the cultural landscape.  Divided into chapters, the documentary starts with Oswalt, moving on to insights from horror director Takashi Miike, film critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, writer Stephen King, and horror director Karyn Kusama, who admits that while the Chainsaw movie includes offensively violent scenes, it also stands as an enduring classic, quote, “a punch in our complacent faces.” Some comments link the film to paintings by revered artists like Frances Bacon and Hieronymus Bosch whose works hang in museums, images with slabs of meat and needle-nosed monsters doing obscene things to body parts. Filmmaker Phillippe, relying strongly on editing skills by David Lawrence, pulls all this together using extensive footage from Chainsaw as well as clips from some 50 other films, including the one author King lists as the first scary movie he ever saw, Bambi.  The five experts make valid points, though not for the squeamish. But then that title Texas Chainsaw Massacre lets you know if you can handle it, either as a 1974 full-length feature or in pieces for perceptive and thought-provoking documentary.