Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #391657 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 256 pages

Customer Reviews

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Stephen Hand)
This book is GREAT! I loved it. If you enjoyed the movie, I recommend you buying this book. It contains lots of the original screenplay. It is like the extended version of the film, as it has stuff that wasnt in the movie. I think this was based on the original first draft of the movie. I couldn't put the book down, it very scary too!

Fair.
I'm a fairly big fan of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie, but a bigger fan of horror literature. I hadn't read a book that was based on a movie before, so I thought I'd give it a shot, plus I was interested on how Mr. Hand would describe it all.

Overall, I'd say Stephen Hand did an excellent job at what he was assigned to do. Put the movie into words. However, there were a few things that bugged the heck out of me. Firstly, he used "to" instead of "too" once, as well as spelled "opossum" wrong. Those, of course, are easily overlooked, _but_ there were some things he did that almost made me throw the book across the room.

1. He used exclamation points in all the wrong places. What was obviously an attempt to get the "Surprise Effect" the movie had, Hand used exclamation points. For instance (these aren't exact quotes from the book, but close enough) "Erin could hear the chainsaw coming closer. She had to find a place to hide. She looked for a closet--but there was no closet!" Maybe it's just me, but using an exclamation point to make her need of a closet more urgent doesn't work at all. All it did to me was make me exclaim over the word "closet" when I read it. However, that isn't the worst.

2. Like above, Hand would also use capital letters to try and make things more "shocking" or "surprising". The result infuriated me. This is a direct quote from the book: "Slowly, Erin got up, her backsliding against the wall as she rose to her feet. If she just see out through the gashes he'd made--
TWO ARMS BROKE THROUGH THE RUINED WALL BEHIND HER AND GRABBED HER BY THE SHOULDERS--LEATHERFACE!"

Here we see the annoying "!" as well as Extremely annoying capital letters. This sequence could be brilliantly described and actually be scary. Instead, Hand makes the reader think there is dialog where a character is screaming. It is ridiculous, and irritating.

---The Good Things---
Okay, so despite a misspelled word here and there, and horrible uses of punctuation, Stephen Hand accurately described the movie to a tee. While even adding a scene or two. Plus you get to get inside the minds of those crazy killers a little bit too. You understand things you didn't understand in the movie. I know a lot of people thought the teens acted stupidly in their situation. In this book, you can understand why they did some things the way they did.

Ultimately, I would have to say that unless you are the hardest core fan of the movie, skip the book. It is so close to the movie it is a complete waste of time, especially since it is the farthest thing from good literature.

Pretty Good Adaptation
This book is a pretty good adaptation of the screenplay by Scott Koslar. Stephen Hand doesn't copy the movie on the screen, but the movie the way the screenplay was orginally written. Overall I think it is a great book and adaptation of the movie.