The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 - Movie Review
I remember getting my hands on a copy of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 VHS when I was a kid. I think I was about nine or ten. Just three years removed from my true introduction to horror, An American Werewolf in London. Horror for me at that time was all about serious terror. As a child the line between fiction and reality was thin. Even things like Freddy Krueger seemed plausible and terrifying. I hadn’t seen the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre at this point. Even with my parents loose rules on content, they had barred this film outright. Between that, and my local Video Powerstore not having a copy of the original, I didn’t get to see the original film until later in life. Luckily, I was able to snag a copy of TXCM2 when it came into the local shop. At the time, mom and pop shops didn’t card for films. They’d let me rent anything (except for the items behind the beaded curtain) as long as I had cash. I remember the elation of getting the VHS in my hands and how I peddled my bike as fast as I could to get home. I only had a few hours to watch the movie before my parents got off work.
People who know me now are aware of my love for extreme horror. The French Extreme and Asian Extreme movements of the 2000’s in particular hold a big spot in my heart. Horror is only frightening to me if it’s believable. These films are gritty, realistic, and show real monsters: US. Humanity is the greatest threat to itself. The person next to you could be a child molester or a cannibal and that is horrifying. I think my love of all things extreme began with TXCM2.
This movie scared the hell out of me as a kid. Even as an adult, the film’s atmosphere and tone makes me itch. The film is shot in vibrant color and light. Every detail can be seen clearly. This film’s budget was massive in comparison to the original film and it shows. The movie starts by following a day in the life of Stretch, our radio DJ heroine. Stretch is hosting her live by request radio show somewhere in the Dallas / Fort Worth area. The day is going normally until a couple of unbelievably annoying college kids call in to raise hell on the air. When the college kids get attacked on a highway by Leatherface and the Sawyer family, there murders are played live on the air. Stretch and her Partner L.G. just write it off as a prank until the boys’ bodies are found on the side of a highway.
Enter Dennis Hopper as Lefty. This is Dennis Hopper in peak form. Lefty is implied to the be uncle of the victims from the first movie. A retired US Marshall hellbent on revenge. He is just as unhinged as the Sawyers. His best scene in the movie involves Lefty visiting a local chainsaw store to pick-out a trio of chainsaws, but only after practicing chainsaw-fu in the store before a cheering store owner watches him demolish a log out front.
The film sounds absurd right? None of this sounds really scary. That’s because it isn’t. It wasn’t meant to be. Tobe Hooper made this film as a parody of the original film. He was forced to make this film as part of his Cannon Films contract. In order to secure the insane budgets for this other films LifeForce and Invaders from Mars, Menahem Golan demanded Hooper sign to agree to make a sequel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
That isn’t to say this film isn’t gross, uncomfortable, and stomach churning. I had always heard the myth of the original film being the goriest movie ever. In reality, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre isn’t a bloody film. The majority of the violence is implied offscreen. TXCM2 is a different story. Tom Savini brings the gore from minute one. You see a college student’s head sawed in half in a moving car by a corpse puppet wielding Leatherface in the opening minutes. As a kid, this scene blew my mind, but it wasn’t was scared me so bad. It was a scene shortly after. The scariest part of the film for me was the introduction of a new Sawyer family member called Chop-Top. The older brother of Leatherface played by Bill Moseley is just gross. He’s a darkly comic character, almost slapstick in nature, but he’s so believably twisted that I still have trouble watching him. His teeth are rotten and he constantly scrapes skin off of his scalp with a wire coat hanger. His mannerisms, twitching, and shaking as just unsettling. This was made in a time before Meth took over the streets. You could say Chop-Top was the blueprint for the waves of tweekers were see today. I didn’t have nightmares about Freddy Krueger as a kid, I had nightmares about Chop-Top.
Watching the movie as a jaded adult is a different experience all together. It’s a fantastic movie night film, if your attendees have strong stomachs. It’s funny, gross, and has some genuine “Oh shit!” moments for everyone to enjoy. Caroline Williams as Stretch is one of my favorite final girls in horror. Dennis Hopper was ramping up to the heights he reached in Water World years later. My only complaint is that the series went off the rails after this point. Pretty much all of the sequels were standalone films or retcons. The series lost the humor and dove into pure torture porn.
SPOILERS:
This film’s ending is one of my favorite horror endings that sets up a great turn of character. The film sets up little hints that Stretch is being inducted into the family by Leatherface. He even places a flesh mask on her to keep her safe at one point. At the end of the film, she seizes the chainsaw from the family’s ancient matriarch and uses it to kill Chop-Top. The film ends with Stretch doing the chainsaw dance atop the mountain above the slaughterhouse. The implication being that Stretch would become the new Leatherface. Unfortunately, this never happened. It was a cliffhanger that never was resolved.
