Mike D'Angelo - The Texas Chain Saw (Chainsaw) Massacre (2)

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper): 82/100The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986, Tobe Hooper): 40/100

Last time I watched The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, back in 2012 (second viewing; first was in ’93), my “review” just quoted Kyle Reese’s description of the Terminator: “Listen, and understand. This movie is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.”

Short, pithy joke reviews aren’t generally my stock in trade (consequently, few I’ve written have generated so many likes—1,918 at this writing, my 11th most popular), but this one seemed to me not only kinda funny but a legit encapsulation, getting more directly to the grimy heart and rancid soul of Chain Saw than any sober analysis could. The film’s just a goddamn waking nightmare, albeit one that’s at times oddly beautiful (not sure there’s a more iconic horror-movie image than the tracking shot that ducks beneath a swing’s seat to follow Pam from a low angle as she walks toward the Sawyer house, the sky above her impossibly blue and the clouds invitingly fluffy); these five kids stumble into a human abattoir sans context or backstory (apart from one’s existing knowledge of Ed Gein), with four of them quickly, efficiently dispatched and the Final Girl left to shriek her way through utterly incomprehensible homicidal threats for half an hour straight. Most of the gore’s suggested or implied rather than seen, and arguably easier to endure than e.g. the endless scene of living-fossil Grandpa repeatedly failing to clonk Sally on the head with a hammer. Leatherface is terrifying not so much because he wields a chainsaw as because…why?!? Why is he wearing a mask made of other people’s faces? Why does he immediately murder everyone who crosses his path? Why is he dressed in women’s clothes at dinner? That none of this gets explained or makes sense is crucial to Chain Saw’s atavistic madness. Hooper does demonstrate a dark sense of humor—my favorite structural element sees Kirk, Pam and Jerry all get killed inside the house, following which Leatherface chainsaws Franklin out in the woods, causing Sally to run in terror straight to the house that we already know will offer less than no refuge (a ploy that nicely sets up Mr. Sawyer at the gas station)—but the film as a whole is superlatively appalling. We, too, are trapped with inexplicable lunatics.

Should such a singular, irreplicable experience get a Part 2? Obviously not. But! What if the sequel were so radically different from the original film as to belong to another genre entirely? Then make an unrelated movie. The best case for this approach is Gremlins 2, which relentlessly mocks its predecessor in ultra-specific ways; I happen to prefer Gremlins to The New Batch, but can at least appreciate the subversive effort. More germane in this case, perhaps, is my idiosyncratic and anti-popular opinion that Terminator 2: Judgment Day, despite all-timer action setpieces and groundbreaking F/X work, is a pale shadow of the first Terminator, thanks to Cameron’s deeply misguided incorporation of the winky screen persona that Schwarzenegger established from 1985–90. Don’t want to argue that case right now (someone can always request for me to try again; I did mostly love it in ’91, so maybe the cutesy “hasta la vista baby” crap caught me on a bad day), just explaining why having Leatherface develop a crush on one of his potential victims wasn’t anything I was looking for. The one-sheet’s Breakfast Club parody alone makes me feel very sad.

But I gave it a chance, and…nah. Let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that an opening scene in which Leatherface wields his chainsaw from a moving vehicle while Oingo Boingo’s “No One Lives Forever” diegetically blares on the soundtrack wouldn’t alienate someone whose love for Texas Chain Saw Massacre is rooted in Kirk’s death occurring at a great distance from the camera via a single slaughterhouse blow to the head from someone we’ve at that point never seen who appeared from nowhere with a face that doesn’t compute for reasons that aren’t yet clear. Let’s say that I were totally down with “but this time it’s basically a comedy!” (To be fair, that mostly involves amplifying elements of the first film’s dinner sequence, which could be perceived as blackly funny if not for Sally’s constant screams of pure terror.) Stipulate that I have no objection to Leatherface giving someone five, or to all the blatantly phallic chainsaw imagery, or to a climactic chainsaw duel that’s goofing on Star Wars’ lightsabers. Nope, sorry, I can’t even feign enjoying any of that shit. It’s like watching Jeanne Dielman as the protagonist of Irma la Douce. But I also found Dennis Hopper’s vengeful ex-Ranger worse than useless, a rare whiff in what was otherwise his annus mirabilis (Blue Velvet, Hoosiers, River’s Edge). Not his fault, really—the character has no personality beyond his lame backstory, behaves irrationally throughout (we meet him trying to cadge publicity for the murders; when Stretch shows up with potentially crucial evidence, he rejects it and throws her out of his room for no reason whatsoever*), and disappears from the movie altogether for long stretches. Even his death happens offscreen.

I did quite like Caroline Williams as Stretch, though more when she’s a spunky DJ than during the scream-queen finale (and her screams are decidedly movie-like, as distinctly opposed to Marilyn Burns’ raw terror, though Burns was admittedly aided by superlative editing that’s nowhere to be found in the sequel). And one scene achieves a measure of the original’s squickiness: Leatherface removing L.G.’s face and placing it on Stretch’s, as she wonders aloud why whatever it is feels wet. (And then L.G turns out to be not quite dead.) Alas, that’s part of the “Leatherface develops tender feelings” bullshit (supplemented by a mask that reveals way too much of the new actor’s own face; it’s now less inexplicable than akin to the half-mask worn by Boardwalk Empire’s Richard Harrow to hide his ghastly WWI injuries) that makes me feel as if watching Chainsaw has retroactively ruined Chain Saw for me. Some films are such perfect objects that they should be left alone. Don’t cheapen them.

* This is a minor point, but 2’s opening narration likewise makes zero sense. We’re told that authorities who heard Sally’s story searched for the Sawyer house but found nothing. How is that possible? Did Leatherface & Co. somehow burn it to the ground or dismantle it without leaving a trace? Remember, the house was within short walking distance of Sally’s old house; she could lead the police right to it. Did I miss some paranormal angle?

ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: The original film clearly says Chain Saw, two words, and there’s no way I can rationalize that as a design element, the way I finally, reluctantly did with Beetlejuice. And I’m sticking with that even though the franchise (if ever a movie didn’t need a fucking franchise) closed it up to Chainsaw thereafter, with 2 even explicitly referring to its predecessor as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (in a “based on” credit, as I recall). Fortunately it doesn’t affect alphabetical order.