This final canard, which still persists despite widespread denials from virtually everyone involved in the film, seems to have produced a lot of the controversy which came later after the film was released theatrically: critics decried its so-called exploitation of real events, while others merely faulted TCM for being too realistically graphic, despite the fact that little of the carnage is actually captured on screen. Documenting (perhaps the best word to use given director Hooper's uncompromisingly detached approach) a family of cannibals that terrorizes a traveling group of young friends, the film is an unrelenting endurance test of brutality and violence made all the worse by its protracted introduction, which posits the victims as relatable (if annoying) everymen and women, and the vague possibility that all of what you see is true, or at least based upon real events. "The most frightening motion picture ever made" is one of those superlatives that generally means one thing - namely, marketing desperation - but in TCM's case, the claim almost sticks there are few movies made that have the same palpable impact whether you're watching them for the first time or the fortieth. But its own endurance relies not upon the difficulty the actors had getting paid, or the diminishing returns of its sequels, but the legacy and achievement of what's up on screen - which as the new 2-Disc Ultimate Edition DVD reveals, is worth vastly more than the sum of its (sometimes disembodied) parts. 32 years of controversy, colored memories and conflicting reports later, the film seems to have become its own albatross - a masterpiece somehow compromised by its own success.
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