Rish Outfield's reviews
This Tobe Hooper horror film is immensely disturbing, gritty, and graphic. It's not wonderfully well-made and it is very cheap, which only adds to the creepily-real atmosphere of the film. It pulls no punches, and although the filthy family of cannibals (I was going to mention that they were from Texas, but I didn't want to be redundant) is thoroughly repugnant, you can't help but almost root for them to take more lives. In many ways, human-skin-masked Leatherface was the trendsetter for film series that came later ("Elm Street," "Friday the 13th," "Child's Play," etc.) where the killer is the main attraction . . . the hero.

The tyranist's thoughts
I have to confess that I saw the fourth entry in this series before I saw this one and that put me off of the whole Texas Chainsaw thing for a long time. Still there is a lot of praise for this one out there and I figured that it couldn't be as bad as what came later so I checked it out. It isn't as bad as what came later, but it really didn't strike me as being that good either.
So five "teenagers" wander into rural Texas and discover a strange family that has a few interesting (but completely unexplained) habits. They start dying.
Truth is if you're a horror fan at all then you've either heard all about this film or seen one of the many rip offs. I was actually pretty surprised to note how much of what they were doing was truly original at the time they made this movie. It still didn't help my opinion much.
My biggest hang up is probably one of the things that actually make the movie scary. They don't bother to explain anything. They barely bother to give an excuse for why five teenagers are out there in the first place and they definitely don't explain what is happening once the killing starts. I would have been curious to understand the family a little more instead of just having them as this anonymous menace that just suddenly pops up. I mean, we know where Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddie Krueger all came from, why not Leatherface?
The budget was low but the quality of the film didn't seem to lack for it. The script seemed a little hurried and not completely thought out. There was a lot of "suspense building" that really goes nowhere before the terror starts. All in all I would have to say that this movie while definitely shocking for its time lacks the elements that would make it a classic in my book and have it hold up next to some of the later slasher flicks that followed. You should definitely see it at some point because the slasher culture owes a few things to it, but don't expect it to be the best thing you've ever seen.