Verdict
Summary
Dinner With Leatherface is a really affecting and loving ode to Hansen’s life, and it thankfully includes tons of footage from his films, behind the scenes images, and lots of fun and insightful interviews with people who loved working with him. Fans of not just TCM, but of horror movies and fandom in general will appreciate it, and it never gets boring or overstays its welcome because Hansen is a great subject for a doc such as this one, and it covers literally every movie he was in – including a few that have never been released – which makes it a dream come true for completists.
Plot:
A documentary about the man who played Leatherface in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Review:
1974’s horror classic (and it is a classic) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre really set the trend for how an effectively made low budget horror film could make a huge profit and spawn a bunch of sequels. Perhaps only the original 1968 film Night of the Living Dead could compare, but what that movie didn’t have was a masked villain, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre certainly had that in its hulking, chainsaw-wielding maniac Leatherface, played by Icelandic-born actor Gunnar Hansen, who befriended filmmaker Tobe Hooper while he was still in college in an acting program. Hansen, who shot the film and then later finished school, was relatively unknown at the time, and more or less remained a humble fixture in indie filmmaking throughout the rest of his life. Dinner With Leatherface is the story of his life, more or less, beginning with the film that made him famous, and because he passed away in 2015, the doc spends a lot of time using clips and footage from almost every project he was involved in, including never-before released indie movies that remain shelved for one reason or another. Documentarian Michael Kallio compiles tons of candid footage of Hansen from horror conventions and movie sets, and speaks with all sorts of filmmakers and actors – his co-stars from the original TCM, his co-stars from other films, including Bruce Campbell, Tiffany Sheppis, Debbie Rochon, Linnea Quigley, Kane Hodder, other actors who played LEatherface in the sequels, and more – and the general consensus among his friends and collaborators was that he was a super nice “gentle giant,” whose life may have been defined by Leatherface, but shaped by other endeavors, including poetry, boating, and spending time creating things beyond mere indie horror films.
Dinner With Leatherface is a really affecting and loving ode to Hansen’s life, and it thankfully includes tons of footage from his films, behind the scenes images, and lots of fun and insightful interviews with people who loved working with him. Fans of not just TCM, but of horror movies and fandom in general will appreciate it, and it never gets boring or overstays its welcome because Hansen is a great subject for a doc such as this one, and it covers literally every movie he was in – including a few that have never been released – which makes it a dream come true for completists. I had a great time watching it, and I’ve never been what I would consider a huge fan of Hansen or the TCM movies in general, although I’ve recently finally converted to being a fan of the original TCM.
Anchor Bay’s recent Blu-ray and DVD release of Dinner With Leatherface has extended interviews as bonus features. One thing that I noticed about this disc is that the sound quality was very low and I had to turn it up to 100 on the TV, which indicated that the sound had some issues. Other than that, this is a full recommendation.
