Tag: Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Hunger (1974)

HUNGER (1974) Four stars

Over a span of many decades, there have been several great dinner scenes in the movies.

The Wedding Feast in FREAKS, the cannibal family dinner in TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, and that famous plate throwing in AMERICAN BEAUTY are three that spring quickly to mind.

Oh, of course, there’s Mr. Creosote from MONTY PYTHON’S THE MEANING OF LIFE and Peter Greenaway’s THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER. (Perhaps, on the next episode, I’ll cover great diner scenes in the movies, everything from DINER to SUPERMAN II and SUDDEN IMPACT.)

In that Mr. Creosote spirit, we now turn our attention toward Peter Foldes’ historic computer animated short from 1974. We use historic not because of the appetite of the main character but historic works here because HUNGER broke ground in using computer animation. Please keep in perspective it was some two decades before TOY STORY and it took Foldes and his National Research Council’s Division of Radio and Engineering’s Data Systems Group well over a year to make this nearly 12-minute film.

This is essentially a silent film, with no dialogue, no narration, not even intertitles. Just instrumental music and images.

That makes HUNGER all the more effective as a cautionary tale about greed and gluttony in contemporary society. It does not get preachy because of the lack of words or tiresome because of the length of a short. The animation holds our interest and it also gives Foldes no limits (except for the limits of his own imagination) in showing this greed and gluttony. Images rapidly dissolve and their perpetually changing nature points out some striking differences.

In HUNGER, our main character evolves from a skinny office worker into a monster.

A couple minutes in, our main character grabs a bite from the delicatessen before dinner and then he goes through a pig, two fish, everything else on the menu, and the dinner table itself before he takes home the waitress who served him. He sits back down to eat and repeats his business from the restaurant in the privacy of his own home. He really likes swine and then he starts developing a multitude of mouths on his body, as well as more hands to fill all those hungry mouths. Of course, he grows bigger and bigger and even bigger, until finally he’s mobbed by a hungry horde of emaciated figures.

This short came out roughly a decade before the Ethiopian famine of 1983 through 1985 that claimed 1.2 million lives and brought images of starving children to living rooms around the world. How many of us now adults remember from our childhood when our parents, confronted by a plate with food left uneaten, usually something not favored by a child, scolded us by reminding us there’s starving children in Africa. Since it’s approximately 13,000 km between Kansas and Ethiopia, sadly I did not let this scolding affect me in the slightest and I wasted all that food. I’m still a stubborn, picky eater.

Both the images of starving children and the main character in HUNGER stick with me, though, and I am not alone in that respect.

HUNGER earned a nomination for the 1974 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film and it competed against THE FAMILY THAT DWELT APART, VOYAGE TO NEXT, WINNIE THE POOH AND TIGGER TOO, and the winner CLOSED MONDAYS (co-directed by Will Vinton). It won a jury prize at Cannes in 1974, the Norman McLaren Award and the Silver Hugo at the 1974 Chicago International Film Festival, and the Best Animation Film at the 1975 British Academy of Film & Television Awards (BAFTA), according to its National Film Board of Canada bio.

 

FIVE MORE HIGHLY RECOMMENDED ANIMATED SHORT FILMS

  1. A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1971, Richard Williams)
  2. THE DOT AND THE LINE: A ROMANCE IN LOWER MATHEMATICS (1965, Chuck Jones)
  3. THE FLY (1980, Ferenc Rofusz)
  4. THE OLD MILL (1937, Wilfred Jackson)
  5. THUMB SNATCHERS FROM THE MOON COCOON (2012, Bradley Schaffer)

NOTE: All five shorts, as well as HUNGER, can be found through online sources.

Tourist Trap (1979)

TOURIST TRAP

 

TOURIST TRAP (1979) Three stars

TOURIST TRAP belongs to a rather fine and distinguished horror movie tradition I’ll call “American Gothic” (forget the famous 1930 painting by Grant Wood).

Other films that fit the bill are several Universal productions, Val Lewton productions beginning with CAT PEOPLE, HOUSE OF WAX, PSYCHO, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, EATEN ALIVE, THE HILLS HAVE EYES, and FUNHOUSE. As you can see, directors Wes Craven (1939-2015) and Tobe Hooper (1943-2017) both liked this mode.

“American Gothic” horror films are heavy on atmosphere, whether they’re filmed in black & white or color. They often delight in exposing the darker underbelly of American society after such happenings as the closing of the local slaughterhouse or the roadside wax museum that once existed on the right side of the road before it was bypassed. They sometimes take on the disintegration of the family unit or any number of issues plaguing our society. “American Gothic” films are rich in metaphorical readings.

Since it belongs to such a fine tradition, you’ll be able to recognize TOURIST TRAP right off the bat and see that it’s a dab of HOUSE OF WAX layered on top THE HILLS HAVE EYES or any of the seemingly hundreds of horror movie plots that begin with car trouble and the wrong gas station and end after several deaths.

Later on, you’ll note that it’s also a pinch of PSYCHO and a dash of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE — Chuck Connors plays wax museum proprietor Mr. Slausen in the grand old Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates style (a hallmark “American Gothic” element)  and production designer Robert Burns worked on both TEXAS CHAINSAW and THE HILLS HAVE EYES.

Just like the Bates Motel had seen better days before PSYCHO, so had Mr. Slausen’s “Slausen’s Lost Oasis.” Nowadays, Mr. Slausen’s wax museum would have been profiled by Roadside America, the guide to “uniquely odd tourist attractions,” and it could have survived and even thrived off this exposure.

If you find wax figures, mannequins, human replicas, et cetera, repellent or they weird you the fuck out, then you will enjoy TOURIST TRAP.

I especially recommend seeing the film before stopping in at Jesse James Wax Museum right off the highway in Stanton, Missouri.

It’s your patriotic duty.

TOURIST TRAP creates a creepy, claustrophobic atmosphere transcendent of the standard issue plot.

From the brilliant opening scene all the way to the bitter end about 90 minutes later, there’s somebody eyeball stalking the protagonists in every scene in TOURIST TRAP.

That somebody’s usually a wax figure, mannequin, human replica, etc., and that’s just creepy, for lack of a better word.

For many years, TOURIST TRAP itself met the fate of “Slausen’s Lost Oasis,” seemingly forgotten and consigned to being a relic of a bygone era of horror movies. Never mind Stephen King’s recommendation in his 1981 book “Danse Macabre.”

The film has made a comeback in recent years.

Cinemassacre’s “Monster Madness” featured TOURIST TRAP in 2014.

In July 2018, Joe Bob Briggs opened “The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs” by showcasing TOURIST TRAP.

It just goes to show you that nobody can ever keep an “American Gothic” horror film down for too long.