Eggshells

When THE Texas CHAINSAW MASSACRE came out I was eagerly looking forward to it because the director had made EGGSHELLS. My wife and I saw EGGSHELLS when we were living in Houston. I'd get off work at 10 at night, we'd go eat Mexican food, and then go to a midnight movie at the Alabama, Tower, or River Oaks theatres inside the loop. They were sponsored by KLOL 101.1 FM and the admission price was $1.01. As you can tell, this was before we had children. In fact, my wife was probably pregnant with our first (born July of 1974) when we saw this. We'd sit in the front row of the balcony because she was most comfortable with her feet propped up on the rail.

I only saw EGGSHELLS that one time, but it's stuck with me all these years. The plot is a little fuzzy to me, but I remember the title because one of the films themes was that our fellow humans are so fragile that we would handle them as if they were made of eggshells.

Although there were supernatural elements to it, this was nowhere near a horror movie. It was closer in mood to THE GRADUATE or YOU'RE A BIG BOY NOW in that it was a coming of age story about young adults.

It was about undergraduates at the University of Texas in Austin. One character comes from a small town and this is her introduction to life in the big city. Several students share a large old house near the University (in a neighborhood I've always enjoyed driving through) and they discover that the house is haunted.

Beyond that plot details get fuzzy, although I do remember that there was a 'hippie wedding' that took place on the lawn of the capitol building.

It gets a ten because although it didn't have anybody famous in it (for years it wasn't even listed on the IMDb and I wondered if I'd imagined it, and I don't know if even Hooper has a print of it any more) and wasn't a techno marvel I could tell that it was made with a lot of love. Hooper was thrilled to have a camera at his disposal and use it to tell his story.

If this ever comes out on DVD I'll be first in line.

this film was a classic hippie film ..........i saw it in Florida at the midnight surf movie theaters. totally unique---- and i have been wondering about it for more than thirty years.

hard to believe this director went on the the chainsaw thing............almost impossible to imagine since the love message of the late 60's was so central to eggshells.

hopefully someone will know how to get a copy.

it's is very satisfying to know that someone else out there remembers this great piece of film and that i just didn't imagine the whole thing.

peace and twang, cg

My summary line will be something of an inside joke that only people who have watched the movie at the Frightfest in London earlier this year (2010) will understand. Those who went ahead and watched it of course. And stayed until the end. Because this is very experimental. Very different too.

And yes if you like it, you will state that this is good because it isn't like any Hollywood movie (well it's not supposed to be). And yes it has it's scenes (though the staircase montage gets a bit annoying after a bit). And also yes to the fact, that this is not really a horror movie. It is more a sci-fi movie than a horror movie. Just in case you expected that, from the man who brought you Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the original that is).

If you are into experimental movies with (almost) no story at all, than this might be for you. Ignore my rating (and all the others who said it's not good). I'm not gonna tell you, how to feel about the weird things you (probably) are about to see.

I saw this film in Austin, Texas, where it was shot, back in the hippie days when I was in college. I just want to comment that I remember being impressed because it was "different" from the Hollywood movies I'd grown up seeing. It was the first movie I saw that struck me as somebody having fun making the movie, rather than whether or not the movie itself was good. I hesitate to comment much on the movie because it has been about 35 years since I saw it. But I can say that many times over the years it has popped back into my mind and I've thought "Hey, I'd like to see that one again." I don't remember anything about the plot. In fact, I'm pretty sure there is not much, if any, plot in the usual sense. What I do remember vividly is a great sequence of a paper airplane sailing through the air the way anybody who has ever folded and thrown one would LIKE for it to fly!

The other comment says much of what I would have said had I got here first, but I saw Eggshells at the Texas Theater, an "art house" on Guadalupe Street (the "Drag") in Austin across from the UT campus. I wish I could remember for certain when it was, but my best guess is that it was sometime between 1969 and 1971. (Since I was at UT from 1969 to 1976, I suppose that I could have seen it after Chainsaw Massacre came out in 1974, but I have a pretty good reason for thinking that's not right.)

Eggshells wasn't very good, frankly, but I saw the hippie bus with the dome around town several times before and after I saw the movie. After TCM came out I was pleased that I accidentally got to see Hooper's first effort.

One correction: I don't think that the wedding scene was on the Texas State Capitol grounds. I'm pretty sure that it was shot in Wooldridge Park on Guadalupe Street between West 10th and West 9th Streets across the street from the Travis County Courthouse. Perhaps the wedding was at the capitol and I've forgotten it, but if so then some other scene was shot at Wooldridge, since there's an easily-recognizable gazebo in Wooldridge that can be seen in the film.