The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

In his introduction for his review of Rick Rosenthal's Halloween 2, Roger Ebert memorably bemoaned, "It's a little sad to witness a fall from greatness, and that's what we get in Halloween II." That exact sentiment can all too easily and distressingly be applied to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Tobe Hooper's 1986 sequel to his own 1974 groundbreaking teen slasher masterpiece. Halloween 2 and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 share a few things in common: both are 1980s sequels to 1970s slasher landmarks, both increase the graphic displays of their villains' carnage, neither comes close to living up to the suspense, horror, and artistry of their predecessors, and most astonishingly, both sequels are at least co-directed by the same director as the original. It's profoundly upsetting and more than a little disconcerting to consider the fact that Tobe Hooper, the director and co-writer of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, is once again seated in the director's chair this time around. Sure, he's exonerated from any responsibility for the atrocious screenplay; that dishonor falls squarely at the feet of newcomer L.M. Kit Carson, who takes over the scripting duty from Hooper and his original co-author, Kim Henkel.

Together in 1973 (though not unleashed to the public until 1974), Hooper and Henkel produced what remains one of the most terrifying, traumatizing, and surreal horror films of all time, a slow-building descent into the bowels of Hell that takes place almost entirely in the real world, in our own backyard. The concept was masterful in its nightmarish simplicity: five young adults gathered in a van on a sunny August morning and took a drive to Texas to investigate the gravesite of the grandfather of two of the travelers after hearing reports of grave robbing in the area. After their van ran out of gas, the youths gathered at the grandfather's abandoned home, only to be abducted, tortured, bludgeoned, slaughtered, and cannibalized by a family of deranged, sadistic hillbillies living in a nearby farmhouse, led by a hulking, mute, mentally challenged, chainsaw-wielding butcher whose own face was disguised by the stitched, skinned faces of his victims. 

52 years later, the story has lost none of its ability to freeze the blood. It set the standard for the teen slasher subgenre, and the genius behind its up-to-11 madness is that, despite a detour into gonzo surrealism in the final act, its horror remained anchored to the laws of reality, bereft of supernatural explanations. As for the horror itself, Hooper artfully elected to leave the most gruesome imagery to the viewer's imagination, emphasizing the psychological anguish of his characters over the gory details of their demises.

Bizarrely enough, despite its deserved reputation as one of the scariest films ever made, Tobe Hooper felt that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre contained an undertone of black comedy that went unnoticed beneath the cacophony of screams and chainsaw-revving. In a misguided effort to rectify that disappointment of his, Hooper set out to produce a sequel that overemphasized the black-comedy quotient while satiating the bloodlust of 1980s horror fans. In doing so, he abandoned the cerebral restraint of the original, along with the atmosphere of encroaching doom. Tonally, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 bears zero relation to its predecessor, despite the stewardship of Hooper behind the camera.

John McCarty, author of the book, Splatter Movies, defined his titular subgenre in a manner described by Ebert as equally concise and disheartening: "[They] aim not to scare their audiences, necessarily, nor to drive them to the edge of their seats in suspense, but to mortify them with scenes of explicit gore. In splatter movies, mutilation is indeed the message, many times the only one." That description fits The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 to a T. Unlike its predecessor, it isn't scary, but rather excessively gory, not to mention ear-splitting, repetitive, witless, and irritating (or rather "ear-ritating"). The original is an exemplary slasher film that understands that the sight of an overweight behemoth in a skin mask snatching a screaming, skinny young woman back into his farmhouse in broad daylight or chasing another through the nighttime woods with a chainsaw is infinitely more horrifying than graphic displays of viscera; this sequel is nothing more than a generic splatter movie, featuring enough bodily mutilations, sawed-off heads, and hammer-bludgeoning to rival the unrestrained bloodshed of Sam Raimi's splatter comedy, The Evil Dead. As Ebert would say, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 isn't so much a horror film as it is a geek show. Definitionally, it's a sequel, but it doesn't even attempt to do justice to the original. Hooper spits on his own grave, and it's a sorry sight to behold.

13 years after Sally Hardesty escaped the clutches of the cannibalistic Sawyer family on the back of a passing pickup truck, a series of chainsaw-related murders have occurred sporadically throughout Texas, but the killers have managed to evade capture. One Friday night, on-air radio DJ Vanita "Stretch" Brock (Caroline Williams) is harassed on the phone by a pair of inebriated high school seniors nicknamed "Buzz" (Barry Kinyon) and "Rick the Prick" (Chris Douridas) as they drive along a desolate stretch of Texas highway en route to the Texas-OU football game at the Dallas Cotton Bowl. Straight from the jump, Hooper and screenwriter Carson supplant the gritty realism of the original Texas Chainsaw with the artificial aesthetic and tone of a standard B-grade splatter fest, opening their belated sequel with a pair of guaranteed dust-biters who are so obnoxious, raucous, juvenile, and lethally rambunctious that not only can you predict they're going to die, but you salivate to watch it happen.

While Rick recklessly shoots a pistol at a row of mailboxes, Buzz, fancying himself as Ace Merrill from Stand by Me, decides to play chicken with the wrong pickup truck, ultimately forcing the driver to veer off the road, all while harassing Stretch over the radio and holding up the line, ignoring her polite pleas for him to hang up. On their way back from the football game, Rick and Buzz call Stretch back to continue their earlier harassment, only to find themselves on the receiving end of their own joke when the trucker they bullied off the road is revealed to be none other than Bubba Sawyer (Bill Johnson), aka Leatherface, and his older brother, "Chop-Top" (Bill Moseley). Together, the brothers teach these hicks a lesson about messing with the Texan locals using Leatherface's trusty chainsaw, and while Hooper does elicit a certain degree of undeniable pleasure in serving Rick and Buzz their just deserts in gratifyingly gruesome fashion, the unrelenting obnoxiousness of their personalities robs the set piece of its ability to generate a miasma of suspense, dread, or tragedy for the losses of two youths who had their whole lives ahead of them. 

Unbeknown to the killers, their act of morally justifiable vengeance was recorded on Stretch's radio show, so she and her assistant/unrequited love interest, L.G. Peters (Lou Perry), overheard the entire massacre. Lieutenant Boude "Lefty" Enright (Dennis Hopper), a former Texas Ranger and the uncle of Sally and Franklin Hardesty who has dedicated the last 13 years of his life to apprehending the unidentified people responsible for the murder of his nephew and permanent psychological scarring of his niece, is alerted to the double homicide the next morning. Due to the gruesome manner in which Buzz was killed, with the top of his head sawed off, Lefty is convinced that the killers have returned and enlists the assistance of Stretch, requesting that she play the audio tape of Buzz and Rick's murder on her radio show. 

This attracts the attention of the killers themselves, who overhear Stretch's tape on the radio, so Drayton Sawyer (Jim Siedow), the oldest Sawyer brother and recent, locally beloved winner of the Texas-Oklahoma Chili Cook-Off (his chili secretly contains "prime meat" from the bodies of his family's victims), sends Chop-Top and Leatherface to murder Stretch in her radio station (despite the fact that many people have probably already listened to her tape throughout the day, so they're not really preventing anything at this point, but I digress). 

In an unexpected turn of events, Leatherface, who harbors a crush on Stretch, decides against killing her, lying to Chop-Top that he did and sparing her life. Unwilling to let the killers get away, Stretch gets in her car and follows them to their hideout, a subterranean lair located in an abandoned amusement park called Texas Battle Land, in which she accidentally becomes ensnared. As Lefty prepares to finally come face to face with the men who ruined his family's life and hold them accountable for their crimes, Stretch must evade detection by the trio of serial killers and figure out a way to escape her hellish surroundings with her life (and skin) intact.

Around the 50-minute mark, once Stretch falls through the trapdoor into the Sawyers' improvised underground home, the tissue-thin plot of Carson's screenplay stagnates into a brutally boring, repetitive, and seemingly directionless runaround in which Stretch literally runs around the amusement park, hides, and secretly watches the Sawyer brothers bicker among themselves and goof around. Meanwhile, Lefty, who has to be one of the most useless and unstable "heroes" in horror history, uses a pair of chainsaws he purchased from a hardware store to methodically saw down the support beams of the Sawyers' home while screaming repeatedly at the top of his lungs, "Bring it all down" and "Bring it all to Hell," rather than use his time to, oh, I don't know, maybe try to find Stretch and rescue her before she's turned into mincemeat. After all, he's the reason she's stuck down there in the first place. 

Experiencing infatuation for perhaps the first time in his miserable existence, Leatherface strains to protect Stretch from his more sadistic brothers via hiding her beside a trashcan, disguising her in the freshly skinned face of L.G., and tying her to his workroom from her hands. Chop-Top and Drayton are provided with even less material to sink their teeth into: Chop-Top prances about with his deceased twin brother, Nubbins', mummified corpse (which looks every bit the Halloween store puppet it is), sprays a fire extinguisher into the air, sings "Bringing in the Sheaves," and shouts random, nonsensical lines like "Nam Land" and "Napalm"; Drayton rambles incoherently about economic inequity and pities himself as "the little guy," bemoaning how he has to pay taxes while movie stars and politicians don't (not sure how accurate he is regarding the former group). Aw, poor Drayton. He and his brothers torture, murder, and eat innocent people, but feel some pity for the old man: he doesn't make a lot of money. Life is so unfair for hardworking serial killers like him. Rather than looking for a job to maybe earn some of that much-desired moolah (or resuming his position as the proprietor of the Last Chance Gas Station), Drayton would rather spend his days berating his retarded younger brothers, kicking them in the butts, calling them "nap-haired idiots," "little coon shits," and "fudge-packers." He also has a habit of screaming, "I told you boys and I told you," without ever completing the sentence. The dialogue sounds like it was almost entirely improvised by actors with no experience in improv.

In the original Texas Chainsaw, Leatherface instantly emerged as one of the scariest antagonists to ever haunt the silver screen. An oversized, childlike instrument of nightmare fuel, he arrived out of nowhere, seemingly from the depths of Hell. His face hidden behind someone else's. No speech, only the ability to scream and moan. An apron hung over his chest, implying that he had more in mind for his victims than mere mutilation. Despite his weight, this killer, half-man, half-monster, could run nonstop, chasing you through the woods without slowing down. He had no personality, no identity outside of what his family molded him into. He didn't kill people out of sadism, he was following the orders of his domineering older brothers like a frightened child, or rather a devoted Nazi. Toxic an influence though they definitely are, his brothers are the only people he's ever known, grown up with, loved, observed. Leatherface doesn't know any better. In his fractured, impressionable mind, his victims are intruders, breaking into his home to possibly hurt him or his family, and like a loyal pit bull, Leatherface won't hesitate to kill them as instructed and serve them up as his family's next meal. In a bizarre way, he's both a terrifying monster and the tragic byproduct of a nihilistic, sadistic upbringing. 

Ironically, the same man who created Leatherface effectively destroys him and everything that made him terrifying in the first go-around. Once a single-minded, implacable force of nature, Leatherface is now reduced to a love-struck, sexually repressed lover boy, torn hopelessly between his unrequited infatuation for his favorite radio host and mindless devotion to his domineering, abusive older brothers. Instead of greeting someone at his metal door with a sledgehammer to the cranium or impaling someone by their back to a meat hook, suspended above a bucket waiting to collect their spilled entrails, Bill Johnson's version of the cross-dressing, chainsaw-wielding, flesh-masked madman puts his chainsaw in front of his groin and thrusts his pelvis suggestively. In addition to an instrument of murder, his chainsaw now assumes the dual dimension of a phallic symbol, illustrating what he wishes he could do to Stretch if he weren't instructed to kill her. 

Even in murder mode, Johnson's Leatherface is never once frightening. While chasing Stretch around her studio, he literally pauses to raise his chainsaw above his head and shake it back and forth. Not only is he missing a face and voice, Leatherface lacks a spine as well, never mustering the audacity to stand up to his brothers. In the end, he caves in to their authority and complies with their demand to try to kill Stretch. He isn't menacing, he's pathetic, at one point banging his head repeatedly against a fan after Drayton chastises him for betraying his family in favor of a woman. 

The protagonists don't fare a whole lot better. Much like L.F., L.G. harbors a thinly veiled crush on Stretch and becomes jealous of her falsely imagined attraction to Lefty. I might have felt sympathy for him were it not for a gross habit of spitting on the floor of his own station at random. Stretch is at least provided an objective: despite her cheerful demeanor, she secretly loathes the station for which she works and wants to be taken seriously as a radio star. As visibly horrified as she is by the audio tape of two teenage boys being terrorized and slaughtered on the road, Stretch quickly comes to view the tape as her chance to "stop playing head-banging music and do something real." But then Carson attenuates any goodwill generated for Stretch by having her foolishly follow her assailants to their hideout after being left for dead at her radio station. Does she at least call the police first to inform them that the killers just terrorized her and reveal the direction in which they're driving? Nope. She just hops into her Jeep and drives after them. Talk about having a death wish. To make matters worse, with a boost from Lefty the Loser, Stretch gets her own dumb ass trapped in the Sawyers' underground amusement park. It takes a special kind of horror film to demand its protagonist put themselves in the Devil's clutch then successfully elicit sympathy from the viewer, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 doesn't pass muster.

As a secondary protagonist, Lefty is provided a job and long-term objective: a former Texas Ranger, he is now a lieutenant seeking revenge for the murder of his unfound nephew. Unfortunately, Lefty begins his arc as a pretentious, unreasonable asshole. While the rest of the law has turned a blind eye to the Sawyer family's still-active killing spree, Stretch is the one person who believes in Lefty's search for justice and offers him a golden ticket in the form of the audio tape, affording him the opportunity to get his story out on her radio show and solicit help. Because of his unearned pride, Lefty stubbornly refuses her help and throws her out of his motel room, only to undergo an unaccountable change of heart a couple scenes later and show up on the front steps of Stretch's radio station, pleading for her to play the audio tape on her show. At the same time that Stretch makes the dumbest mistake of her life that sets the second half into motion, Lefty shows the dubiousness of his intentions, chasing Stretch in his car to the trapdoor of the Sawyers' lair, scaring her into believing he's a member of their family, before finally getting out and calling her name to reveal his supposedly harmless identity. 

It's abundantly obvious that Hooper's direction for most of his cast was to go over the top. As the morally questionable Lefty Enright, Dennis Hopper delivers a performance so hammy that he would be more suitable as a deli associate than a lawman. He fails to convey the underlying tragedy of a man whose nephew was murdered 13 years prior, whose niece was permanently traumatized beyond comprehension, and whose insatiable thirst for justice is continually dismissed by his fellow lawmen, who would rather write off every chainsaw-related incident as unrelated accidents. Brandishing chainsaws in a hardware store as though simulating a battle with an invisible opponent, revving them up and smashing them repeatedly against a tree branch (much to the bouncy elation of the owner), Lefty comes off as unhinged as the trio of serial killers he's spent the last 13 years pursuing, thus nullifying our investment in his cause. 

The two best (not to mention career-starting) performances of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 are submitted by Caroline Williams and Bill Moseley, each making their horror debuts. This movie paved the way for a long and fruitful career in horror for both modern icons. As our damsel in distress, Williams exudes energy, sex appeal, and a seemingly illimitable pair of lungs, the latter of which makes her an incredible screamer. Which is a blessing, because she's required to scream her way through almost the entirety of the 101-minute runtime. Even in her quieter and more restrained moments, such as her introduction to Chop-Top in her studio, Williams does a brilliant job conveying paralyzing fear in her bulging eyes and shaky line delivery, all while straining to retain her composure against an obviously dangerous psychopath. Regrettably, Hooper gives her nothing to do besides run, cower behind corners, scream at the top of her lungs, and beg for her life. There's only so much of a character you can craft out of such limited elements.

For Bill Moseley, Chop-Top Sawyer was the role of a lifetime, solidifying him as a go-to actor for horror villains. Clearly, Chop-Top was the unintended audition that booked Moseley the more three-dimensional role of Otis B. Driftwood in Rob Zombie's Firefly saga. The costume, hair, and makeup design for Chop-Top are a trifecta of nightmarish artistry in and of themselves. In his introductory scene, which showcases Moseley at his most heart-stopping, Chop-Top has broken into Stretch's radio station and made himself at home in the lounge. He wears a Sonny Bono wig to obscure a nearly bald head (save sporadic strands of long dark hair) with a partially exposed plate cover. To affect a hippie persona, he wears a pair of purple glasses and makes the peace sign with his pointer and middle finger while declaring "Music is my life." His complexion is chalky-pale, predating his skin tone as Otis in House of 1,000 Corpses. As a subtle detail to establish his twin-ship with Nubbins, a "wine stain" birth mark has been painted on the opposite cheek. 

Chop-Top punctuates his first chilling interaction with Stretch by casually lighting the tip of a clothes hanger and picking at the scalp around his machete wound, eating the dead skin after. While Chop-Top chews his own skin, Moseley has a fiesta chewing the scenery around him, imbuing his role with a multitude of quirks and fascinating physical choices: walking with a hump, delivering his lines with the rapidity and stammer of an overstimulated child or nervously excited fan meeting his idol for the first time, flashing a manic grin that displays his rotting, buck teeth, laughing masochistically at slashing his own throat with a straight razor. Moseley is at once blood-curdling and infectiously exuberant, transitioning from chastising Leatherface for destroying his wig to praising him for (falsely) killing Stretch in the same breath.

Hooper executes Carson's inherently unsalvageable story at a plodding pace, allowing scenes to drag on infinitely and failing miserably to extract even an iota of gallows humor from this witlessly wacky scenario. Take the scene where Leatherface corners Stretch in her office. As she backs into the corner with her legs spread on either side of a tub of ice, Leatherface plunges his chainsaw in the ice, inching it toward her crotch, and editor Alain Jakubowicz cuts back and forth between Leatherface sawing the ice and Stretch screaming for mercy. For God's sake, saw or get off the ice! 

In Carson's most derivative sequence, he and Hooper rehash the iconic dinner scene from the original beat for beat. Where some considerate cutting would have come in handy from Jakubowicz, Hooper rubs our noses in every detail ad nauseam: Leatherface and Chop-Top hold Stretch's head down into a bucket, 137-year-old Grandpa Sawyer (Ken Evert) struggles to bludgeon her with his trusty mallet, drops it on the floor, Drayton picks it up and puts it back in Grandpa's hand, Grandpa tries and misses again, until finally Drayton saves us all some time and does the deed himself, as if to say, "OK, at this point, even I'm getting bored as fuck." 

Hooper has assembled (or rather re-assembled, save Jim Siedow, the only returning Sawyer from the original) a game cast of sadistic cannibals, but Carson's script honors them with zero scary material to play with. For far too long, we're just watching Leatherface, Drayton, and Chop-Top flail around and bicker clownishly among themselves like the Three Stooges without any evidence of directorial control. They're not doing anything remotely scary or inflicting harm on anyone. Once they finally capture Stretch, it's too little, too late, and all it leads to is the aforementioned drawn-out dinner rip-off. Moseley and Siedow are at least having a blast improvising lines that are unintelligible, unamusing, and reveal nothing of their personalities, nor do they propel the story forward. 

Aside from the high-energy performances of Williams and Moseley, the greatest asset of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is the set design of the Sawyer family's newfound home, the underground remnants of an abandoned amusement park. Decorated with multicolored Christmas lights, skeletal remains, and fleshy, severed body parts impaled on meat hooks, this hideout is a fun, expansive, and visually inspired hellscape that appears to extend into infinity and cleverly visualizes the incongruity between the Sawyers' adherence to traditional family/domestic values and their inhumane disregard for fellow human life. A winding slide welcomes its unsuspecting visitors into their newfound hell from which escape is exceedingly difficult. A corridor features a functioning traffic light on one side and a family of skeletons sitting around a picnic table on the other, backgrounded by a beach umbrella. A golden yellow hue and hellfire red glow suffuse the lair, symbolizing a place of family-friendly joy and innocence corrupted by forces of impenetrable, devilish evil. 

In the original, Hooper took a cerebral and restrained approach to the violence, cutting away from the hook-to-flesh penetrations, sledge-to-skull bludgeonings, and chainsaw eviscerations to allow our imaginations to fill in the blanks. In the sequel, Hooper says a pox on such restraint, hiring iconic Friday the 13th special makeup effects artist Tom Savini to make up for every graphic mutilation that he had only alluded to 12 years earlier. Having lost none of his skill in his transition from one slasher franchise to another, Savini designs a slew of unforgettably gnarly, goopy, and commendably practical visuals: the top of Buzz's head sawed off and a fountain of blood squirting from his exposed skull; L.G.'s raw, fleshless face, exposed ribcage, and skinned legs; a puddle of intestines that streams out of a wall; close-ups of Lefty's chainsaw piercing Leatherface's stomach and exiting through his back. Nothing is left to the imagination this time around. Jakubowicz doesn't cut just before the moment of impact. The blood is bright red, and Hooper and Savini revel in it as though it were a hot shower, embracing the gory freedom of an R-rated splatter film. 

Unfortunately, the gore is so over the top that it loses credibility and crosses the line into cartoonish camp; Chop-Top bludgeons L.G. over the head repeatedly with a hammer, but despite the puddle of blood that increases around him, L.G. remains alive, whimpering and convulsing. Hours later, after his face and torso are skinned, he pops back up and manages to stand on his feet long enough to unbind Stretch, utter a groan-inducing double entendre ("I'm fallin' hard on ya, honey."), and whisper his final word: "Shit." It's hard to empathize with Stretch's grief in this moment. 

In tandem with Jerry Lambert, Hooper composes an energetic and upbeat but overbearing and irritating score that, if nothing else, matches the ghoulishly goofy tone of the movie as a whole. For better or worse, it's aurally memorable, but Hooper over-ensures as such by overplaying the theme throughout, not only during the opening credits but every chase scene and even during unfrightening moments, such as when Stretch trails the killers to their hideout and when Lefty speeds toward her for no discernible reason. In the latter case, Hooper uses his music in service of a false alarm, musically warning his audience to be afraid of Lefty, his alleged hero of the story. 

Over the last 40 years, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 has acquired a cult following, with many fans likely celebrating its "daring" tonal departure from the original and reveling in its oddball mixture of graphic carnage and macabre humor. On the Tomatometer, it sits at a 53% from 36 reviews with a middling average rating of 4.9/10, exemplifying the divisive effect it's had on audiences. For me, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 fundamentally flunks on three levels: as a horror film, despite a single tense interaction between Williams and Moseley, it never even attempts to garner an atmosphere of horror; as a splatter comedy, the splatter is too cartoonish to take seriously and the comedy isn't funny; and as a sequel to one of the most trailblazing and traumatizing horror films ever made, it doesn't come close to recapturing the documentarian authenticity or up-to-11 insanity, despite the return of half of its masterminds. The original almost feels like a documentary we were never meant to witness; from the start of Part 2, we're fully aware that we're watching a 1980s splatter film. If you prefer your bucketloads of entrails mitigated with a side of off-the-wall buffoonery, this might be your nirvana. If so, have at it. Otherwise, rewatch Hooper's timelessly terrifying 1974 original or Marcus Nispel's equally brilliant (and tragically underrated) 2003 remake. 

In the poster for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 -- a parody of the one for The Breakfast Club -- the tagline promises, "After a decade of silence... the buzzz is back." Too bad what Hooper delivers is more of a buzzkill.

4.2/10