‘Chainsaws Were Singing’ review: This ’70s horror throwback is a time capsule… of the early 2010s?

Shot over a decade ago, guerilla-style in Estonia, the low-budget horror musical Chainsaws Were Singing is a pastiche of genre tropes that its filmmaker spent years completing nearly by himself. Sander Maran stretches the definition of multi-hyphenate in Neil Breen fashion; as the movie’s writer, director, composer, cinematographer, sound designer, colorist, and VFX artist, Maran turns in a work that, while often repetitive in its humor, has a fair amount of charm.

While the movie echoes cheap grindhouse pictures and horror B-movies of the ’70s, it also functions as an inadvertent throwback to when it was first filmed in 2013. That’s due to its outdated, often snarky tone, which feels reminiscent of the era’s burgeoning web humor. Its gestation period makes it a fascinating time capsule, but the film is also, in its own way, an homage to low-budget, DIY creativity, even if it often feels like peering in on half-formed in-jokes from afar.

What is Chainsaws Were Singing about?  

With its cheap, bright-red blood galore, Chainsaws Were Singing tells you exactly what kind of film it is — and what it’s aping — right out the gate. A young woman named Maria (Laura Niils) is having a particularly terrible day, involving the loss of her job, and the death of her family and even her dog in quick succession. She meets a man named Tom (Karl-Joosep Ilves), whose own misfortunes have led him to a suicide attempt. Their eyes lock just as Tom contemplates jumping off a bridge, which sends them into a sweet duet that’s quickly interrupted by a chainsaw-wielding maniac (Martin Ruus).

This killer — named “Killer” by his cruel, overbearing mother (Rita Rätsepp), à la Psycho — is perpetually soaked in blood and spends much of the movie cartoonishly spilling the guts, eyeballs, and gonads of anyone he can get his hands on. Maria ends up his prisoner, which sends Tom on a lengthy hunt to find her. Along the way, he enlists the help of an idiosyncratic driver with whom he hitchhikes, Jaan (Janno Puusepp), who seems grating at first but whose loyalty makes him a lovable character. 

Along the way, the unlikely heroes come across all sorts of oddities of the “LOL, random!” variety that truly hammers home the movie’s vibe of friends hanging out with a video camera and shooting on weekends. They’re kidnapped, at one point, by a jungle tribe who call themselves the Bukkake — a Japanese word for a specific pornographic act — and in rescuing Maria, they have to contend with a pair of incestuous male cousins, whose incest and queerness aren’t so much the platform for any other jokes as they are the punchline themselves.

How much music does this horror musical have?

Credit: © Marani Bros 2024

Chainsaws Were Singing can’t help but feel a tad retrograde and written on the fly, though perhaps the more pressing disappointment is that the movie’s “horror musical” promise goes largely unfulfilled. Running nearly two hours — much longer than something with the feel of an extended CollegeHumor sketch ought to — it features few actual musical numbers. However, they’re major highlights when they finally do appear.

The hefty, largely silent Killer goes on violent rampages, but the movie also affords him surprisingly tender moments that craft a lengthy, tongue-in-cheek backstory. His tale is reminiscent of villains from well-known horror landmarks, from Psycho‘s Norman Bates to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre‘s Leatherface (the latter being a key stylistic reference throughout). Ruus makes for the movie’s most, and perhaps only, dearly sincere element — not to mention its most lively, when Killer performs a “chainsaw solo,” fiddling with his mechanical murder device as though it were an electric guitar.

The problem inherent to Chainsaws Were Singing — a title that screams “Horror Musical!” at full volume — is that apart from Killer’s solo number, the songs are mostly ironic, with a wink and a nudge towards the screen. This insincerity may be typical of genre farce, which the movie most certainly is, but its constant irreverence becomes especially demanding at feature length. There’s a reason such parodies were relegated to online shorts in the 2010s, after all. The film emerges from a period of irony proliferation; when it began filming, Deadpool was still a few years away, and the likes of YouTube and Vine had recently granted low-budget creators the opportunity to flex their artistry, but Maran feels too talented to keep insisting that it’s all a lark.

Perhaps he would do things differently today. The footage is, after all, a decade old, and its sardonic bent has made it a genre festival favorite; it recently won the Fantastic Fest award for Best Horror Feature. But Maran’s work also features sparks of genuine inspiration and deft stylistic imitation, which almost make one wish for a more condensed feature — if not an extended short — which had streamlined his parodic approach.

Chainsaws Were Singing is a mix of too many styles and eras.

Credit: © Marani Bros 2024

The movie’s affinity for styles and textures of the past is its central comedic bit, and this is wielded awkwardly at times. Its grindhouse throwback element is ever present, thanks to the movie’s battered film print look and blown-out highlights, which perfectly imitate withered celluloid. However, what’s being presented on screen is distinctly modern despite its many references, as though the film’s central nostalgia weren’t for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and exploitation horror but for the act of watching and revisiting such works many years later.

It’s effectively tailor-made for the midnight genre audience, but it’s often rendered an exercise in nostalgia for nostalgia itself. Its jokes have little to say about the kind of films it’s spoofing, especially when it briefly strays into what feels like found-footage territory; there’s no self-reflexivity involved, despite the movie constantly breaking its own fiction for the occasional gag.

However, on the rare occasions when the movie is sincere, it also becomes stylistically dialed-in, in a way its other ’70s homages are not. When Maria sings a lament from her prison cell, her song may be laced with jokes, but enough of the environment falls into shadow that modern designs are no longer visible. She ends up lit with an ethereal glow reminiscent of films from the era, as though this brief sequence were ripped from a movie made not 10 but 50 years ago. It’s wonderful, if fleeting.

Maran’s goofy spark is delightful in its own right, even though the humor of repetition eventually becomes repetitive itself. It would all be easier to digest if it didn’t feel so endless. Still, as a DIY project shot with practically no budget, the long-gestating parody justifies is own existence as a curio of a simpler time, when new filmmaking tools had imbued micro-independent cinema with a sense of optimism, as though the democracy of digital tech would even the playing field for all. More so than the movie’s ironic bent, this is perhaps its most wistful throwback.

Chainsaws Were Singing was reviewed out of its U.S. premiere at Fantastic Fest.