Undeniably influential but not a film that lives up to the reputation it had been built up to in my head after only hearing about it for most of my life. Honestly less torture than I expected, and of course the gore isn’t as wild as you might think. I don’t have any problem with that- by today’s standards the original Texas Chainsaw is relatively bloodless. But I expected more of that film’s suffocating darkness and atmosphere. It’s not so much I needed the guts and gore, but more that I was expecting more of the film to be like the scene with Josh and the failed Doctor. This twisted intimate and cruel interplay between torturer and victim. Much of that is actually left off screen, and it’s more a tense escape through the hellish facility and a country where Paxton has no allies, no familiarity with any of the environment, completely alone and separated from all he knows.


There’s value to that, but even that’s not played as much as I would like. I appreciate the commentary on the othering Americans do, the crass entitlement and objectification. I appreciate Paxton’s arc and the ambiguity of the ending. It doesn’t quite congeal into something great, though, and it doesn’t either revel in how awful the trio is enough or how awful what they’re going through and how they grow or reveal themselves enough. I appreciate what it influenced, and it’s a fun enough time. But it didn't live up to the unfair expectations my memory had created around it.