2024 has shaped up to be a boon year for DIY cinema, with achievements like Hundreds of Beavers and The People’s Joker emerging as critical darlings and massive audience hits alike. Despite their minuscule budgets and relatively unknown performers, these films have been lauded for their formal ingenuity and innovative storytelling techniques, both significant contributing factors to their wild successes. Not one to be left out of the conversation, Estonian filmmaker Sander Maran enters the low-budget fray with his own feature, Chainsaws Were Singing. Self-proclaimed to be a mix of “Monty Python meets The Texas Chain Saw Massacre meets Les Misérables,” Chainsaws Were Singing is indeed a horror-comedy-musical, evoking the spirit of Peter Jackson’s earlier splattery efforts as it aims to make viewers laugh, cry, and feel sick to their stomachs. Well, two out of three ain’t bad, as Chainsaws Were Singing is largely enjoyable to watch, brimming with enthusiasm and endless buckets of fake gore to accomplish its mission. The feature ultimately runs too long for comfort, diluting its cleverness as it stretches past its baked-in expiry date, but for the first two-thirds of its runtime, the unhinged enthusiasm feels infectious.
Chainsaws Were Singing wastes no time getting to the carnage, opening with Maria (Laura Niils) being chased by Killer (Martin Ruus), a “fuckface with a chainsaw” who carves up a hapless bystander in the process. Meanwhile, they’re being tailed by Tom (Karl Ilves), a recently single and depressed young man who has met and fallen in love with Maria, vowing to save her from this menace. He’s accompanied by goofball Jaan (Janno Puusepp), offering his various motor vehicle skills for assistance. (In a hilarious running gag, every car seen in the film explodes if it so much as runs out of gas. “They go like hot cakes,” Jaan laments.) Killer eventually makes off with Maria, taking her back to his family of backwoods cannibals, led by the violent and domineering Mother (Rita Rätsepp) with the intention of adding Maria to the dinner menu. Divided up into chapters, Chainsaws Were Singing switches POVs between its lead characters, gifting each with extended musical numbers to tell their tales. For Tom and Maria, it’s a blossoming relationship, except Maran subverts romantic expectations by having Maria proudly profess in song her unconditional love for Tom’s body hair, weak knees, and beer breath. For Killer, the tale is of a misunderstood giant with a gentle soul, thrust into a vicious lifestyle by a sadistic matriarch, who even framed him for the murder of his own father. If that doesn’t make it clear, Chainsaws Were Singing has plenty of energy to spare, even emulating Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead animated camerawork at its best, zipping from one set piece to another. The press materials cite The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as an influence, but the film is really more akin to Tobe Hooper’s gonzo sequel, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, eschewing any actual dread for deranged amusement.
Not everything lands as intended. At nearly two hours in length, Chainsaws Were Singing runs out of gas long before it reaches the finish line — films of this ilk tend to play better when they clock in around the 90-minute mark, clocking out before they become too exhausting. This longer runtime allows Maran to indulge in plenty of narrative digressions, the lamest being an encounter with a group of forest dwellers dubbed the “Great Bukkake Tribe” who seek enlightenment from a fridge-dwelling entity that spews copious amounts of ejaculate. Sure, it results in the obvious gross-out gag you’d expect, but it also stops the film dead in its tracks to execute the punchline. And so, at the end of the day, Chainsaws Were Singing feels tailor-made to be a hit with midnight screening audiences, who are sure to celebrate its serial irreverence and exaggerated violence. No worries, though: to gauge whether you might be a member of this most amenable audience, Chainsaws Were Singing offers the perfect litmus test with a sequence that showcases Killer’s brute force as inflected on a trio of disgruntled motorists: one poor bastard forcibly has his eyes gouged out, then proceeds to get his testicles ripped off and subsequently shoved into his newly emptied eye sockets, causing him to exclaim “Ow, my eye balls!” while predictably writhing in a great deal of pain. If that sounds like your particular idea of a good horror film time, run, don’t walk, to Chainsaws Were Singing.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2024 — Dispatch 1.
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