Chainsaws Were Singing (Mootorsaed laulsid) screened at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2024
In director/writer Sander Maran’s feature debut Chainsaws Were Singing (Mootorsaed laulsid), Tom (co-writer Karl Ilves) and Maria (Laura Niils) are having very bad days. Maria has lost both her parents to an accident, and her pet has died. And Tom has been dumped by his girlfriend, causing him to contemplate suicide. Ok, maybe Tom is a bit melodramatic. Yet as Jaan (Janno Puusepp), the happy-go-lucky, helpful motorist whom Tom will soon meet, points out, things can always get worse – and even though life seems to be looking up as Tom and Maria meet and instantly fall for each other, there is nothing quite like the arbitrary intervention of “a fuckface with a chainsaw” to test a couple’s love.
Now the bearded, blood-soaked Killer (Martin Ruus) has abducted Maria to his highly dysfunctional woodland home, where his brothers Pepe (Ra Rangnar Novod) and Kevin (Henryk Johan Novod) and mother (Rita Rätsepp) will turn out to be even worse than he is, even as his younger adopted brother Pelle (Peeter Maran) must decide whether he is going to follow the path of artist or killer. As Tom and Jaan set out to rescue Maria, they are variously helped and hindered by multiple exploding cars, by a pair of incompetent cops (Thomas Kolli, Olavi Saar), by a rambling avenger (Kristo Klausson), by woodland cultists who worship a cum-spraying deity, by a lesbian hedgehog, and by a handy passing gunman (Peeter Kivimäe). In the end, though, they will have to depend on themselves and each other in the face of a family that slays together – even if Killer, who has been murdering strangers and cannibalising his victims since he was 8, may not be such a bad guy after all.
Where history has repeatedly proven the immense influence of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) on the horror genre, few would have seen its impact extending to an outrageous Estonian musical comedy where anything goes, and where good taste is the first to die. With its compulsive killer under the thumb of a controlling mother, Chainsaws Were Singing also borrows extensively from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) – and even more so, from Mick Harris’ Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990). Mostly, though, it is a foot-tapping, toe-curling, vomitous trawl through the very lowest of human drives and politically incorrect themes, and if it opens with the unmistakable sound (although not the sight) of a beer can being opened, that is just its way of announcing that the ideal viewer should come well lubricated (one of Killer’s many victims may feel similarly when he is sodomised with a chainsaw). This may present a deeply negative view of family, but it also shows the miraculously curative power of love, friendship and roadweed, while making fun, with a skip in its step and a tune on its (severed) tongue, of anything and everything.
strap: Hooper blooper: Sander Maran’s feature debut brings gory musical rom com to a backwoods family of murderous cannibals
© Anton Bitel
