THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2
A title more trashy than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre!
"I ain't got no fear left", wheezes a drunk Lefty in this movie. No, he doesn't, but this line could easily have come from Tobe Hooper himself, fully realizing that he used up his last scary moment in The Funhouse. Abandoning almost all pretense of making an all-out terror assault like the original, Hooper goes for the "gore comedy" thing, and overall, has done a considerably good job.
Stupid Brian trivia: I have actually owned FIVE copies of this movie. The first turned out to be the heavily cut version (d?oh!). The second was broken, and I only found out long after the receipt was gone. The third got mistakenly thrown out. And the fourth I finally decided to replace with the Anchor Bay version, which has stayed safe and sound ever since. Lucky for me, each copy only cost me between four and eight dollars.
"Boys, boys, boys" said Dennis Hopper in the ads, ridiculously huge chainsaw in hand, chainsaw in a holster on each hip. Twelve years old, I was in awe. "This will be the greatest movie ever made," thought I. How could this go wrong? Between the extremely cool ad campaign ("After 12 years of silence...the buzz is back!")(or 13, or 14, depending on who you ask) and the poster which hilariously spoofed that for The Breakfast Club, I knew I was looking at a winner.
Mind you, I never actually got around to seeing it until 1993.
The opening monologue in this baby (narrated with a chilling, deep voice by an uncredited speaker; no idea if it's Cedric Smith as I've expected) tells us that poor Sally Hardesty, the survivor of the original film, has stayed in a catatonic state for the last dozen years - so if she's going to be the star of this movie, it's gonna be a really dull one. The good news is, the star is Dennis Hopper. (the better news is, said monologue includes the words "hacked up for barbecue")
Hopper plays Lefty Enright, a law officer out of his jurisdiction who after twelve years thinks he's finally made a breakthrough in his personal manhunt for the cannibal family responsible for the ugly fates of his niece Sally and his nephew Franklin. (personally, I'd be hunting them down to give them a trophy for killing Franklin, or at least a big hug and a high-five) The more legitimate law enforcement offices are reluctant to help him - they keep denying that there is any sort of ongoing Texas Chainsaw Massacre, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Just why they'd want to cover this up other than to make Lefty into a lone wolf, I don't know.
Enright, clearly at least as crazy as anybody in the Sawyer family (get it?), enlists the aid of an radio DJ named Stretch (Caroline Williams), who's dissatisfied with "playing headbangin' music" and covering chili cookoffs. She somehow managed to record the chainsaw-mangling of two yuppie twits who got nailed by the clan while on the phone with her. Just how that works, I'm not sure - the connection could only be broken on the sending side. This seems like an awfully bad setup for a radio station to have, though it's my understanding that systems in some older areas have been like this for decades. He basically cons her into following the family to their weird underground lair beneath an abandoned theme park, where they live in a sort of squatter's splendor, and then follows her in turn. Singing "Bringing In The Sheaves" and proclaiming himself "The Lord of the Harvest" ("What's that, some new health food bunch?" asks Drayton Sawyer, the family patriarch), he sets to work bringing it all down from within.
This drive-by chainsaw attack is not exactly expertly handled - at what's supposed to be 90 miles per hour, we see the two vehicles very slowly go down this impossibly long bridge, and after it reaches its final, inevitable result, the bridge we see in the day isn't even the same kind of bridge. (and why would a Texan radio station be called K-OKLA, anyway?)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 seems to want to be some sort of satire on consumerism, but doesn't really do much with that. Dawn Of The Dead this ain't. Sure the Sawyer family has branched out from their self-sustaining ways in the original to start a business (passing off those teeth in their chili as "hard-shell peppercorns" and making delicacies like "eyeball pate"); not a whole lot is done with this. The only thing it successfully satirizes is a concept that wouldn't really be solidly in the public eye for another five years - the ol' Family Values. They might be cannibals, and they might be insane, but the Sawyers are most definitely a family with values. They stick together, goddammit! You'll never see Leatherface out on a street corner buying crack from some 11-year-old with pants the size of North Dakota. You won't see Choptop and Drayton in group therapy alongside Dr. and Scott Evil. They have their problems, but they solve them internally, without getting social workers involved. If that ain't family values, I don't know what is!
Naw, attempts at thematic depth aren't what sets this movie above the crowd - it's acting, gore and hilarious dialogue that make this even more memorable than the original (yeah, that's what I said. At the 53 minute mark, this movie just keeps right on going).
The script is care of L.M. Kit Carson; what he wrote here would have had me and my high school friends going around quoting this movie constantly (much like we did Fright Night, Aliens, Return Of The Living Dead, and many others) had we seen it at the time. I'm having to suppress my raging desire to throw in my favorite lines, but there's just so many of them. (okay, there's "Lick my plate, you dog dick!", which I've said to a few people since, not that they had any idea what I was talking about)
The performances are whacked-out and grandly entertaining across the board. Hopper plays a maniac, as always, with his typical Hopper flair. Williams is charming and believable as Stretch, at least when she's not screaming at the top of her lungs (and that's a lot). Her best moment comes when she's finally cornered by Leatherface after a chase down a seemingly endless tunnel in the Sawyer lair; she sobs that this just can't go on, and it's nobody's fault!
And the cannibal brood? Man, those guys should've been Oscar-nominated. Bill Moseley creates a classic character as Choptop, a complete nutbag who was in Vietnam during the events of the first film, and returned home with a steel plate in his head. He keeps picking skin away from it with a hot coathanger while wearing an ill-fitting Sonny Bono wig. He's at least as far out as Stephen Geoffreys was in Fright Night, but better written. (it's kind of sad that Moseley never went on to get any more really good roles) He's probably the most off-his-rocker Vietnam vet the movies have to date graced us with - he even wants to start a theme park called Nam-Land! (he also gets sampled in the Primus song "Jerry Was A Race Car Driver") (although I still don't understand what "Dog will hunt!" means) He's completely unpredictable, shifting from hammer-swinging mania to boyish enthusiasm (note the scene where he berates Leatherface for accidentally sawing him in the head but praises him for supposedly killing our heroine). Some have supposed that Choptop really is the hitchhiker from the previous film - I find that a little unlikely, considering what happened to that hitchhiker. Nossir, the hitchhiker is more likely Nubbins, the apparently weightless carcass that Choptop is seen dancing around with for much of the film.
Jim Siedow (who claims to love only two of his three children) comparatively underplays his role as Drayton, the only actor to return from the original film. Drayton sees himself as the bearer of a terrible burden - that is, keeping in line those lunatics he lives with. And it's no easy task - how do you explain a concept like sex to a retarded cannibal three times your size who wears a mask of human skin?
Leatherface is non-acted by a new guy here (Bill Johnson, not like it matters), and the performance basically consists of running and looking pathetic. Hooper doesn't even try to keep this guy as a figure of terror - he's like a big, pathetically stupid tyrannosaurus puppy. Yeah, he's incredibly dangerous, but you can't be afraid of somebody this much of a big suck. (note how his attempts at romancing Stretch basically amount to keeping her around and hiding her from mean ol' Drayton as if she were a stray kitten)
The rest of the cast just does what they're supposed to. Stretch's producer L.G. (Lou Perry) reminds me of Mojo Nixon for some reason; Grampa still can't hit anything with that hammer. And there's a hardware store owner who shows this really weird, inexplicably gleeful reaction to Lefty trying out one of the biggest chainsaws I've ever seen. What's with this guy?
The gore by Tom Savini is disgusting - make sure to watch the 100-minute version, not the 89-minute version I originally bought. Some of the scenes are so disgusting that they're kind of hard to watch (in particular, a scene where one guy has his face, part of his chest, and part of his leg cut off, his still-wet face put on our heroine as a mask, and he's later revealed to still be alive!). It's a good thing that so much of this gore is defused with humor, because if it were all taken straight, that would just have made this movie no fun at all. Another example is Choptop's hammer-attack on one unlucky bastard; It's bloody as hell, and really disturbing to see the poor bastard flail around like that, but Choptop's battle cry ("Incoming mail!") is good for a chuckle.
It's not just gore, either - there are a number of exceedingly gruesome or perverse moments which might have just made the movie uncomfortable if they didn't play out the way they do; some ultimately do just that anyway. I can't say I cared too much for the "chainsaw as penis" aspect of things; it really made my skin crawl, and while it effectively added to the nuttiness of the whole affair, it wasn't in a good way.
Still, while it might make you squirm, it's hard not to have a good, long laugh at so many parts of this movie. Choptop alone makes it worth the view. Extra points must be awarded for the inclusion of a couple of songs from Concrete Blonde's excellent first album - something which also helped endear The Hidden to me. The score is weird, but not very effective at?well, anything, really.
I actually have some complaints about Anchor Bay?s 1:85 widescreen version of this film. For one, the picture quality on the extra scenes after the credits is the worst I've seen on a legitimate release. It's just TERRIBLE - I do understand that these scenes are in a rather primitive stage of development (no music or sound effects), but still, this is at least a hundred times as bad as dreadful. Another is the trailer included - it's a rather nondescript teaser, not any of the ads which so inspired awe in me as a wee one. And finally, there's the last shot of the film. Soft-matted, there's more of a picture in the "pan & scan" (actually fullscreen) version than there is here. Now, even when things are soft-matted, I normally prefer the widescreen version anyway, because that's what the director wants to show. But here, in that last shot, previously, we were given one subtle touch - trucks and cars zipping on by in a highway in the background. This is cut out in this version. What made this part of the shot so cool to me was that it served as a reminder - after all the weird, almost surreal stuff that we've seen happen in this movie, it's still only a stone's throw away from the real world. 'twas a nice touch, apparently never really intended by Hooper, and that's a shame.
A lot of fun, and the last movie made by Hooper that more than three people liked. I still maintain that it's not a case of the mighty falling, but the humble fluking out.