"KEEP BUSTIN'."

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

Two Halloweens ago we discussed Tobe Hooper’s first masterpiece. This is his second. He didn’t even want to direct it at first, sort of got pushed into it, but damn did he rally. In many ways THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 is the Tobe Hooperest movie ever made.

I don’t blame you if you’re skeptical during the opening scene where two obnoxious “senior boys at Wheeler High” calling themselves “Buzz and Rick the Prick” drunkenly drive a Porsche, fire guns, and harass the K-OKLA request line until they receive a drive-by chainsawing on a bridge that must’ve been built by the same people who made that endless runway from the climactic chase in FURIOUS 6.

I’m not big on that murder-victims-who-“deserve”-it trope, but in all other aspects I love this movie’s ultimate ‘80s-horror-ness. Thanks to the work of makeup FX genius Tom Savini (coming off the triumph of DAY OF THE DEAD), it actually shows the graphic gore people imagined they saw in the first film, and then goes way further than that. There’s a soundtrack of quirky rock from the likes of Timbuk3 and Oingo Boingo, thanks to Stretch’s job at a radio station. Instead of the mob-connected makers of DEEP THROAT, Bryanston, this was produced by the Israeli-owned makers of Chuck Norris movies, Cannon, and the sequelization approach is almost more like an action movie than, say, a FRIDAY THE 13TH or a HALLOWEEN. It’s bigger and more expensive, the humor is more outrageous, andthough the body count is technically low the number of dead bodies is off the charts, even without including the wall of skulls.

I think a major problem with most of the Hooper-less CHAINSAW sequels and remakes is that they think it’s all about Leatherface. They never make him look as good and the actors never portray him as well, but more importantly they just don’t get that the other family members and the dynamic between them is the important part. This is the only sequel to bring back Jim Siedow as The Cook, and the only to have a worthy substitute for The Hitchhiker (R.I.P., now a dead body they carry around called “Nubbins”).

That substitute would be Chop Top, played by Bill Moseley, long an obscure figure who thankfully has been given his due as a great horror actor after Rob Zombie put him in HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES. He starts with an imitation of Edwin Neal’s performance in the first film (a parody short called The Texas Chainsaw Manicure got him the role) but evolves it into his own thing – a wiry, hyperactive freak with real, monstrous menace underneath his buffoonery. When he trespasses in the K-OKLA radio station after midnight and pretends not to understand that Stretch is asking him to leave, repeating each of her “Good night!”s in a different funny voice, it hits that rare, beautiful horror frequency where I’m laughing out loud and also feeling a real tension in my gut. This is a really funny movie but I never think of it as horror comedy. The horror is relentless. It’s not fucking around. The comedy is there to taunt you.

And it really must be said that only a Tobe Hooper movie would have a character who’s introduced holding a bent coat hanger that he keeps heating up with a lighter and scratching at his head with and after a while you figure out that he’s picking off pieces of skin from around the exposed metal plate in his skull and snacking on them. Just a neat little character quirk.

I think this is also the only CHAIN SAW followup that successfully reinvents Leatherface. I don’t know why they didn’t get Gunnar Hansen back (one story is that he was insulted by the amount of money they offered), but, despite what some of my fellow purists say, Bill Johnson really gives Bubba a real characterization here, kind of a pitbull – potentially friendly, but also ferocious. Crucially, he gave him a new trademark move, holding the saw above his head and doing a bizarre little side-to-side shimmy with his torso as a prelude to an attack (or mating call?). Also helpful: Savini’s highly detailed mask and the out of fashion suit he wears make for just the right mix of disgusting and comical.

The script by L.M. Kit Carson (BREATHLESS, PARIS TEXAS) has been rightfully praised for its satirical wit, but also deserves credit for its carefully calibrated mix of rehashing the original and not rehashing the original. We have that reconstituted trio of cannibals, and it’s building toward a supersized restaging of the original dinner table climax, but it’s not at all the same group-of-friends-picked-off-one-at-a-time structure. And it’s not out-of-towners cluelessly sticking their noses where they don’t belong. After radio DJ Stretch (Caroline Williams) hears the initial murder live over the phone she intentionally lures the killers to her by playing the tape on the air over and over. When they attack her she escapes Leatherface, but follows them home. She’s going after them!

Even setting aside everything else that’s great about this movie, it would be monumental in the genre just for how far it takes the “same but bigger” sequel tradition. One of the things that makes the original film such a classic is the detailed production design of the house, with its room full of bones and feathers, chickens in cages, turtle shells hanging from strings, table settings made from body parts, the big metal door that opens to the crimson wall covered in skeletal trophies. For part 2, Hooper and production designer Cary White (GETTYSBURG, MEAN GIRLS, Yellowstone) seem to have asked “Where can we take that now that the company that makes the DEATH WISH sequels gave us a couple million?”

So instead of filling a house with dead animals the family have repurposed the entire “Texas Battle Land” theme park into an underground lair, including tunnels decorated with tableaus of posed corpses, naturally lit with lamps and Christmas lights so director of photography Richard Kooris (CAROLE KING: ONE TO ONE) could do the chase scene in long, unbroken takes. There’s an absolutely incredible shot when they get to the dinner scene – it’s already a huge, elaborately decorated table in a big room with all kinds of stuff in the background, then it pulls back and back and back and you see that it’s an enormous room full of more weirdo graverobber decor than we could ever take in, though we can definitely see that they’ve re-created the DR. STRANGELOVE bomb drop with a skeleton. Might as well reference Kubrick, because they took the most elaborate scene from the ultimate low budget horror movie and then made the opulent BARRY LYNDON version.

As I’m writing this, we’ve got an extremely consequential American presidential election coming up on Tuesday, and the tension (and the pandemic) have sort of put a damper on candy corn season. I go on walks to relax and my mind wanders through everything I’m angry about, everything I’m worried will happen. I feel like it’s very clear what the will of the people is, and even more clear that the people in power are planning some bullshit to thwart that will. And it’s not clear that they will fail, or what we can do if they succeed, and when I think about it my stomach tightens up like I have stage fright.

But I’ve had some success escaping into the horror movies I try to marathon at this time of year anyway. I have a review of another horror classic that’s all ready to go and worthy of posting on Halloween. But late on Wednesday night it hit me that THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 is the horror movie of this moment. Of course it is. We thought we got away. We thought everything could be okay again. We didn’t know it would get worse. Years later not only are they still getting away with it, they’re being more flagrant about it, making money off of it. Winning chili contests, living it up in fancy new digs. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre “seems to have no end,” according to the narration.

This review is itself a sequel to that 2018 one I wrote of the original TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. After referencing it as a favorite over and over across two decades of movie reviewing I finally sat down to write my definitive CHAIN SAW piece, but I couldn’t help looking at it through the lens of a country two years into Trump. I used it as a symbol for the complete lack of comprehension many of us have of our fellow Americans (whether family members or strangers) revealing a completely alien set of values through their support of the death cult/hate group/pyramid scheme that is Donald Trump fandom.

For this Part 2 analysis I’m interpreting it the more obvious way. The Sawyers are Trump and friends. On the surface they’re very different – they obviously come from a different social class, they have a combat veteran in their family, and obviously Drayton comes across much nicer and less deranged in his public appearances as an award winning chili chef than Trump does as a president. But they’re living in massive opulence by the standards of their lifestyle, the house full of bones and animal parts having expanded to a massive underground complex. And when Lefty shows up to stop them, Drayton assumes it’s a business thing and tries to pay him off. Rich people shit.

Hooper and Carson were parodying Reaganism with some of this, so it overlaps with tried and true Republican themes of yore that mutated into the MAGA ideology. Drayton complains about property taxes and waxes nostalgic for the alleged good old days before technological changes at the rendering plant made the killing not as fun. He reveres Grandpa, a confused, drooling monster he says is “137 years old but as fast as Jesse James” even though his hands are too shaky to continue the family murder traditions. And since they live in the wreckage of Texas Battle Land, their house of horrors is literally built on tall tales of violent conflict.

Ironically it’s the straight horror stuff that more closely resembles Trumpism: the victimizing while complaining of victimization, the long history of flagrant violation of the innocent without ever being held accountable. The opening narration says that “It seems to have no end.” The police never got them because “No facts; no crime.”

And it’s frustrating because there’s so much crime, and they’re so brazen about it. The Trump people/everybody else dynamic can be pretty well summed up in the encounter between Chop Top and L.G.:

L.G. (walking into the station and discovering a weirdo on the floor going through his records): Hey! What the shit?”

Chop Top: “Lick my plate, you dog dick!” (proceeds to bash L.G.’s head in with a hammer and bring him home for meat)

Nothing is too foul, nothing is sacred. For God’s sake, their brother died 14 years ago and they don’t give a fuck, they just carry his corpse around and use it as a puppet. (insert Herman Cain joke)

Lefty is the one investigator trying to put a stop to this madness, with very little backing from the system. He’s not like the guys who went after Trump, trying to maintain a reputation as an institutionalist. He believes when they go chainsaw, we go chainsaw. He uses strategic leaks to the media and finds their literal skeletons in the very large metaphorical closet, but he’s powerless. It ruins and ends his life. It leaves him yelling “They can’t do this!” and “Bring it all down!” as he tries to do just that, sawing at the support beams. We feel you, Lefty.

Chop Top and Leatherface, of course, drive around in a huge pickup truck with an American flag covering the tailgate. If I may be so bold, I don’t believe they share my idea of American values. Chop Top is a veteran and now wears the tie-dyed clothes and peace symbols of the counterculture, claiming “music is my life” – I don’t know if it’s appropriation or trolling – but he doesn’t seem torn up about his war experience. He excitedly pitches a section of the park called “Nam Land.” I think this was Hooper turning the “Do we get to win this time?” themes of ‘80s movies on their head.

It’s fitting, I think, that our hero is a rock DJ – it aligns her with the youth culture, the artists, the rebels. Chop Top knows she’s cool, calls her his “fave,” but has no qualms about trying to kill her.

She’s also, of course, a woman, who asks not to be called “darling,” and doesn’t like that Lefty doesn’t want to involve her out of paternalistic protection. And she knows men well enough to pick up on the phallic nature of Bubba’s saw and realizes she can defeat him by feigning sexual interest.

Obviously this is not a family with a healthy view of sexuality. Drayton warns, “It’s a swindle, so don’t get mixed up in it.” The only woman in their family, and likely the only one they ever respected, is the dead Grandma they keep mummified in a shrine in the artificial amount above the park, and seem to believe is alive.

I’d say the sexual politics are of then, not now, but whatever you think of the things this movie puts Stretch through, the point is she gets through them. She fights, she bites, she literally climbs out of metaphorical Hell, from the dark catcombs to the sun-drenched surface, up to the top of that mountain, dumping Chop Top into the hole like garbage as the whole thing comes crashing down on the motherfuckers.

And she stands up there looking like a mad woman, waving the chainsaw around, mirroring Leatherface’s dance at the end of the first movie, but for her it’s a victory dance.

And that right there is the reason I had to watch this movie in this week of anticipation and hope and dread. Because some day, whether it’s in a couple days, or after a whole lot more fighting and running and climbing out of Hell, we’re gonna push past this era. We’re gonna survive, some of us. Hopefully most of us. And I imagine it’s gonna feel a whole lot like standing on top of a mountain, spinning around and stabbing the air with a chainsaw.

Happy Halloween everybody. Be safe, climb out, spin around.

NOTE: I also wrote a pretty thorough tribute to this movie when it first got a special edition DVD fourteen year ago. I tried not to overlap too much with this one.

 

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 31st, 2020 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Horror, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

31 Responses to “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2”

  1. Happy Halloween, y’all!

  2. I hadn’t seen this in a very long time. My experience was the first 40 mins sets up a potentially interesting new take on the TCM but the min they go into the amusement part I saw it had an hour left. I checked out and the movie never recovered for me. But it still doesn’t stop it from being one of your favorite movies

    Happy Halloween

  3. slowclap.gif

    But you didn’t answer maybe the most important question we’re all wondering… did you watch the Shout! Factory 2K master or the cinematographer-approved HD transfer?!

  4. Couldn’t say it any better than this. I watched this for the first time a few weeks ago (commented on the old review after) and it absolutely blew me away. It’s *so* timely and it’s *so* cathartic when Stretch is up there at the end, doing her own goddamn chainsaw dance. It immediately shot up to the tops of not just my favorite horror movies, but my favorite movies period. Exactly the movie I needed this year.

  5. Geoffreyjar – I watched the most recent Scream Factory blu-ray. You’re telling me there’s a better transfer streaming or something?

  6. Nah, just jonesin’ ya. A/V nerd humor! Since we humans must fight about everything, we must fight each other video transfers of cult movies from boutique labels!

    Disk one of the Shout! Blu is their new 2K transfer and disk two is the HD transfer from Arrow Video in the UK. Color timing is different but from a purely technical standpoint the Shout! one is better.

    Seriously though, great write up.

  7. I still miss the VHS version where you can see that truck drive by in the background of the final shot.

  8. I’m a huge fan of TCM2, but my wife loves this movie. It instantly went up to the top of her splatter-movie list.

    I married well, is what I’m saying.

  9. Majestyk – I’m obsessed with that because in the VHS years I thought that was the most brilliant touch. It’s saying “Yeah, and all this was happening right under everybody’s noses, they were driving by and had no idea.” I restrained myself from going into it here since I mentioned it in the other review, but since then I did get a chance to ask Bill Moseley about it at a horror convention. He said he didn’t know for sure if it had been intentional, but his guess was that it was, because Hooper was always very attuned to those sorts of details.

  10. That explains why I didn’t see the truck the last time I watched this.

  11. Probably why you didn’t like it. That truck really makes the movie.

    This is a really excellent review, by the way, Vern.

  12. You get me.

  13. VHS certainly could play some tricks on you. Especially if you had a version a friend with two machines had made for you. I remember me and my brother used to watch MAD MAX 2 (the original, lost version with the arrow in Wez’ arm and boomerang scene intact), and having just read an interview with Gibson where he jokingly said that he got teased on set for wearing pink slippers between takes, we were convinced he had them on in the scene where Max leaves the compound. Of course DVD revealed that it was rags tied around his boots…

  14. Hmmm, I saw this in the theater on it’s release, and my experience was pretty much Sternshein’s.
    I watched it again on TCM (in their ‘home from the bar’ block on Saturday mornings at 2 am. It wasn’t on at like three in the afternoon back-to-back with ‘Mildred Pierce’ or anything) about eight years ago, and while I guess I ‘got’ the satire of the whole thing more, I still can’t say I liked it. It’s certainly big, loud, and dunderheaded. But again, I was pretty much done with it long before the movie was done.

    Yet, for whatever reason, I expect to have some sort of epiphany with it at some point. I guess it’s because way too many people whose opinion I respect seem to love it. Maybe in 10 more years…

  15. One of your best reviews VERN!
    As an outsider I find your countries politics, government and president truly repulsive and they are scarier than the made up monsters we watch on screen.

  16. I don’t know if I posted this on some old review (or on a review of one of the other installments in the series) or, at this point, if it’s even my own original idea. But the way to do TCM2 in this era is for the Sawyers to be discovered by the public and become a right wing cause celebre. They become the family from Duck Dynasty: rustic and rural, (fake) working class entrepreneurs, they love making the libs cry, and they’re invited to the White House. That tape of their murders is fake news! It’s those snooping teens who are the satanic necrophile cannibals! Lefty is deep state*! It’s all a hoax! And Bill Moseley plays The Cook now.

    * shades TCM: The Next Generation

  17. Watched this for the first time a few months ago, then read all your previous TCM pieces. I love the reading of the Sawyers as the Trumps (or Trump supporters). Since they’re making yet another entry into the series, I’d really like to see one that goes all-in for that comparison, with Leatherface and Chop Top wearing MAGA Hats, reciting QAnon conspiracies (or maybe Chop Top *is* Q), calling everything they don’t like “Antifa.” An illegal immigrant would be our heroine, crossing the border for a better life and immediately running into the worst America has to offer. Make America Gory Again. I’ve thought too much about this.

    As for TCM 2, I broke up my viewing over two nights. The movie felt really awful to me– initially in the common sense of the word, but then also in terms of the sublime. It gelled for me when they get to Texas Battle Land. (Side note: Amazing set. Surprised Stretch didn’t bump into Sloth from the Goonies). The characters and situations would be funny if they weren’t so horrific. So a lot like America today!

    I decided the movie was about being a woman in modem America. Stretch is the only female character of substance, surrounded by men who want to fuck her, fuck with her, fuck her over, and/or kill her. Even the “nice” guys have pent-up unrequited affections, or use her as bait for chainsaw cannibals. She navigates it all for the sake of survival, but we see it break her. There’s a little bit of Fury Road in this film. I’m not sure if that final shot is joyful or tragic.

  18. I appreciate the kind words. Sometimes, like on this one, I get really into a review that’s meaningful to me but I worry it will be nonsense to anybody reading it. So thank you for letting me know you liked it.

    Another thing about the history of watching this on VHS is that I saw it multiple times in a censored version. At some point – I think it was before the DVD, like an unrated VHS release or something – all the sudden it had the whole long scene where she finds L.G. with his face cut off. I had never seen it before and it was shocking that there was an even more gruesome version than what I had been watching. I think some of Chop Top hammering him had been cut as well.

    Ancient Romans – I love that idea. I’ve been thinking about a Texas Chainsaw for our time, since they’re actually making one right now, and I thought it would be funny if they accused their victims of being “Antifa looters” or something. But it hadn’t occurred to me they’d become right wing celebrities. Does open carry include chainsaws?

    I suspect the one that’s being made (shot in Bulgaria or something) is not gonna have much/any social commentary in it, which would be such a wasted opportunity. But I’m cautiously optimistic that it could be fun since it’s produced by Fede Alvarez. (Kinda wish he was directing.)

  19. Bill – I think we were writing at the same time, so I didn’t see yours before. Great point about how all the men (even the good guys) treat Stretch, and I like your idea about an immigrant hero in a Chainsaw movie. That’s hinted at in the opening scene of the unofficial sequel BUTCHER BOYS, but they never come back to it. It has occurred to me that the chainsaw family would definitely be some of the most racist motherfuckers you’d ever meet, which is both something that seems worth dealing with and something that might be no fun to watch.

  20. Just rewatched this for the first time in a minute cuz it’s free on Prime currently. And it’s easily my favorite TCM movie. Not sure why I haven’t picked it up on Blu.

    Fun note, it’s listed in the trivia on IMDb that Hatchet 3 director, BJ McDonnell, told Caroline Williams to play her character in the movie as though she IS Stretch(even though it wasn’t written that way since she was cast well after the script was at least at it’s shooting draft), having changed her named and devoted herself to investigating serial madmen and supposed urban (rural?) myths that she believed were actually real.

    BJ is an old old friend of mine, so I texted him this morning to ask if this was true.

    And yep… totally true. So there’s a fun piece of something or other.

  21. I also told him about WORM ON A HOOK and that he should license the rights for a low budget joint while the getting is good.

  22. Holy shit, you guys. We made it.

  23. Hoo ray politics are boring again!!

  24. ONE NATION UNDER A GROOVE

    I hope Norah Jones is having the most fun ever and that she didn’t know that was going to happen.

    This is one of the times that I wish I still lived in The Bronx. LET’S GET LOUD, LET’S GET LOUD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  25. See you soon Springsteen and the New Radicals!!!!!!!!!!

  26. We all know that this shit isn’t really over, but man, does it feel good to not have to worry about POTUS being a total psycho anymore. It’s like waking up in the hospital after a life saving surgery. You are glad that you don’t have to worry about that problem anymore and are in good hands, but you also know the next week will still be painful, uncomfortable and you might puke a lot and sleep bad.

  27. CJ, on behalf of all good Americans I would like to thank you for both your international empathy and understanding of universal siblinghood.

    Are you a fan of the Chemical Brothers’ “Midnight Madness” music video, by the way?

  28. I’m a huge Chemical Brothers fan and this is one of their best videos.

  29. I guess a TEXAS CHAINSAW thread is as good as any to say Congratulations!

  30. CJ – nice! I thought you’d be a fan.

    If anybody else would like to see a video where a hilarious-looking Nosferatu-esque weirdo in a glittery costume incorporates the disciplines of breakdancing, stuntwork, intelligent use of CGI as something to assist with (and not replace) human achievement and funny creature-acting then this is the video for you. It’s a film that I think a lot of Vern folks would appreciate and enjoy, including The Original King of Criticism himself. Also, is it named after the Eddie Deezen movie?

    SPOILERS FOR MIDNIGHT MADNESS: I like how the furthest extent of the Midnight Madness freak’s mischief consists of throwing two bags of trash out of a dumpster, shaking up a can of soda (or beer) and pridefully looking at itself in the mirror and giving an approving thumbs-up to his freaky visage.

    A friend of mine pointed out some years ago that if there is any video that Beavis and Butthead should watch, it is this one.

    Also if you all want to see more good-mood videos featuring both funny, pointy-eared freaks and great, triumphant, hook-y songs from groundbreaking UK music groups, the Halloween performances of The Damned from October 2019 where Dave Vanian wore Nosferatu gear are all so good. DV playing to the crowd’s digital cameras is so funny, there is this Drac hand thing he does at the end of the performance of “Smash It Up” that makes me laugh every single time. I hope that the post-COVID, original-lineup reunion ends up actually happening and he dresses up as The Creature from the Black Lagoon all the time or something.

  31. All Chemical Brothers videos recently got really good HD remasters on YouTube. Actually lots of classic musicvideos did. A trend that I really love. You haven’t seen TAKE ON ME until you saw the official 4K remaster!

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