Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 5:3	Budget Low

What a pleasant surprise this movie was. The plot is okay, the acting is marginal but the cinematography is excellent. Every scene is well lit, properly exposed and nicely staged. Instead of the talking head photography of many of these types of movies, there is depth and motion in almost every shot. Even the night shots are done well and the image never goes grainy. Way too often low budget movies are shot on inferior equipment by cameramen with limited experience. In some cases this is merely annoying, in others it is painful. In this movie, the cinematography is a joy.

The story is one of your basic crazy cannibal family movies and just in case you don't get the connection, Gunnar Hansen (Leatherface from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre) plays Daddy who dies defending his family. With a chainsaw. His dying words to his daughter Sally are "take care of the family". I suspect that Dad had things like "make sure your brother gets to school on time", but Sally took it to mean "kill and eat anyone who ticks you off". We are introduced to Sally as a mild-mannered librarian shushing a loud-mouthed patron. When repeated requests to be quiet are ignored, she follows him into the bathroom and stabs him through the ear with a paper spike. Soon after this in her Chainsaw Sally persona, she tracks down a girl who did not return a library book in time and ensures that she will never be late with a book again.

For a cold-hearted murderess, Sally is surprisingly likable. The people she kills clearly don't deserve their fate, in fact they are chosen almost whimsically. This may be the ultimate in wish fulfillment, people are killed for the slightest insults. Some of the victims are simply shown at the house with no backstory whatsoever. If the producer of the film would like to post in a blog somewhere exactly how you get a set of twins to show up at your house to play twister in lingerie, I am sure that it would get a lot of hits. But alas, that bit of knowledge is left out of the film. Anyway, back to Sally, she sort of has three personas. We quickly see the quiet, rule-obsessed librarian and the gleeful killer, but there is also a little girl aspect that shows through occasionally in the scenes with her brother. Aside from the first couple of scenes where she is terrible, April Monique Buril brings some real acting chops to this role. Rather than play the entire movie over the top, she shows just enough crazy to keep you on edge. Unlike Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde where there is a severe dichotomy between the two aspects of their personalities, Sally personality does not change that much between her two characters. When the ice cream girl openly flirts with her date, Sally makes an icy comment or two and gives the girl a killer look. Later she dons her Chainsaw Sally persona, patiently tracks down and seduces the girl, convincing her to go to Sally's house, take off some of her clothes and let Sally tie her up. We are never expected to believe that Sally doesn't know what her other half is doing. I like this for a couple of reasons. One, Sally stays consistent through the whole movie. We don't end up with some wishy-washy murderer who is doing it because they think they hear voices. Two, it allows the writer and director to focus on secondary storylines.

In this case the secondary aspects include the person who actually owns the land that Sally's house is on, a developer that is trying to purchase the land, his female associate who is supposed to convince the guy to sell the land anyway she can and a minor friendship between Sally and guy who owns the land. The first two storylines are handled in a really clunky manner, but the third is done extremely well. Without a lot of words the director manages to get across a feeling that the guy likes Sally as a friend, that Sally knows this and is okay with it, and then the feeling of betrayal when she believes he is going to sell the land. By the way, we get zero backstory on this guy and in the end don't even know if he was going to sell the land.

One thing that is interesting about the movie is that two or three times it looked like we were going to get some nudity and sex, only to have the scene end abruptly. I am not sure why this was done. The movie has already sort of established that Sally is bisexual, so going the extra mile and expanding on the scene where she pushes aside the dozens of teddy bears on her bed to revealed a trussed up blonde isn't really going to change her character. Ditto the scene with the twins and the game of twister was cut short without going into some extra sex, nudity and gore. (I actually thought this was going to reference the scene from Blood Sucking Freaks where Master Sardu and the midget were playing backgammon for toes and fingers, so I was doubly disappointed when it went nowhere). I am of the opinion that if you are going to hire actresses for a movie because they look good with their clothes off, then you should have them take their clothes off. Believe me if the film had been submitted to the ratings board they wouldn't have gotten past the first ten minutes without getting an NC-17, so limiting the nudity wasn't going to change anything. The director might have decided that these scenes slowed down the pace of the movie or decided to only tease about the sex. Fortunately the movie is entertaining enough that it didn't need to throw in a bunch of nudity to remain interesting. Though I wouldn't complain. Did I mention the twins and twister scene?

The movie could have gone in a dozen directions and easily gotten scattered and confusing, but the director and/or editor kept the main storyline together and only hinted at other plot lines without exploring them too deeply. It was great to see competently filmed movie with a clever premise and well written scenes. Not quite a classic, but a very solid movie. I am not a big fan of the current batch of torture and terror films that are out there as I like some humor with my slashing. Chainsaw Sally is vastly more entertaining than those one note horrors.

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