Teens tooling around in their groovy hippie van cross paths with a family of psychotic grave-robbing cannibals (as opposed to well-adjusted grave-robbing cannibals). The all-male family enjoys cooking food that they catch and kill themselves (ie. human meat) and building their own furniture (from the flesh, organs, and bones of people and animals). You could say they’re frugal.
In more timid times, I was afraid to see this movie. The title, the poster, the description, and its reputation as among the vilest of the vile made me hold off. That cable TV never used to show Texas Chainsaw Massacre only enhanced its reputation, to one who’d never seen it, as something particularly disturbing.
When I finally saw it in my early 20s, the film turned out to not be the relentless festival of blood and guts that I imagined. It IS a great and uneasy horror film though, one so well-directed (by Tobe Hooper) that you come away from it thinking that you saw more violence than you actually did. It’s also kinda sort of a black comedy, too. Virtually every scene here is classic, with my favorite being the one toward the beginning where the kids pick up Edwin Neal, cinema’s freakiest hitchhiker.