It took nearly a decade for them to come out with the sequel to the groundbreaking and genre-defining original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Was it a cut above? Ehhhhh…
I will let the exposition text crawl from the opening of the film set this one up…
“On the afternoon of August 18, 1973, five young people in a Volkswagen van ran out of gas on a farm road in South Texas. Four of them were never seen again. The next morning the one survivor, Sally Hardesty-Enright, was picked up on a roadside, blood-caked and screaming murder. Sally said she had broken out of a window in Hell. The girl babbled a mad tale: a cannibal family in an isolated farmhouse… chainsawed fingers and bones… her brother, her friends hacked up for barbecue… chairs made of human skeletons… Then she sank into catatonia. Texas lawmen mounted a month-long manhunt, but could not locate the macabre farmhouse. They could find no killers and no victims. No facts; no crime. Officially, on the records, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre never happened. But during the last 13 years, over and over again reports of bizarre, grisly chainsaw mass-murders have persisted all across the state of Texas. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has not stopped. It haunts Texas. It seems to have no end.”
Stretch is a DJ in Texas. Her usual show airs from mid-afternoon until early in the morning. She is used to getting a bunch of jackasses calling into her show and, well… being jackasses. One night she gets one of her usual calls but as it continues to linger on the air, the caller is attacked by someone on the road with a chainsaw. The call only ends when that car runs off the road and the driver/passenger are seemingly killed. The next day a Texas Sherrif is on the scene at the crash. Turns out he has been investigating or tracking the possible killers all over Texas and he is once again on their heels and trying to stop their killing spree. Lefty (the Sherrif) has an ad put in the local paper asking for any information on the crash, and he gets only one response, Stretch and her recording of the phone call.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the original) is arguably one of the best horror movies ever made. It was so unnerving and had me sweating while watching it. I loved that movie and I knew that I was missing out on not watching it for as long as I did, but I took care of that. So this year I decided that I needed to see the sequel. A movie that oddly occupies a space in my head that I laid out in an article that I wrote trying to trace the origins of my love of horror movies here. Imagine my surprise upon watching it to realize it was A) a Golan and Globus “Cannon Group” picture and B) it was not very good.
As I said while watching it, the set design is really out there for a horror movie of its time. The Sawyer homestead and the slaughterhouse apparently are all set up inside an old amusement park dedicated to maybe Daniel Boone or Jim Bowie. Old statues and mockups of the 19th-century pioneers are scattered around. Inside the skinning house, there are bones and skulls made into entire walls. It really sets the tone for the entire compound of death. It’s gross and dark, and spooky, just like you would want a house of horrors to look.
The cast is hit and miss. Dennis Hopper plays “Lefty” and is a crazy man on a mission to figure out what happened to his niece and nephew that were slaughtered by the Sawyer. For Hopper, it’s a pretty tame role but one that he plays perfectly. Vanita “Stretch” Brock is also well portrayed and I commend her for playing a character that for the better part of her screen time is flat-out screaming her guts out constantly. The rest of the cast is… okay. Just as crazy as anyone else in the other films antagonistic family but Chop Top comes off less menacing and more just annoying. Leatherface has a weird love story and some strangely acted comedic moments. The rest are forgettable.
I was pretty let down by the entire movie really. It’s not nearly as creepy as the original and the menace isn’t really there in any way from the Sawyer clan. It’s not great, but it’s far and away better than Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation.
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