The Cannon Film Guide Volume II (1985–1987) by Austin Trunick

Author:Austin Trunick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BearManor Media
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 arrived on VHS more than a decade after its predecessor hit theaters.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

Release Date: August 22, 1986

Directed by: Tobe Hooper

Written by: L.M. Kit Carson

Starring: Dennis Hopper, Caroline Williams, Lou Perryman, Jim Siedow, Bill Moseley, Bill Johnson

Trailer Voiceover: “The buzz is back!”

Although it has found an adoring cult audience in the decades since it was released, it would be hard to fault any moviegoers who demanded their money back after seeing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) during its original theatrical run. Was it a bad film? No. Was it a total departure from the movie that preceded it? Absolutely.

The original Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), released twelve years prior to its sequel, is one of horror cinema’s undisputed classics. Gritty, grimy, and suspenseful, the movie set the tone for a decade’s worth of American horror films to come afterwards. It also birthed a wave of masked boogeymen, with the chainsaw-toting Leatherface cutting a path for psychos like Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees to become the true stars of their respective franchises. Director Tobe Hooper turned the independent horror film’s low budget into an advantage, with the grainy film stock and a cast of unknown actors adding an extra layer of pseudo-realism to the feature. To top it off, Texas Chain Saw Massacre was marketed as being based on a “true story,” fooling a lot of its early audience members into thinking that a murderous family of cannibals was still on the loose in the Texas countryside.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, on the other hand, doesn’t even pretend it takes place in the real world. This is a movie where Dennis Hopper plays an alcoholic, Bible-thumping, ex-Texas Ranger named “Lefty” Enright (pun intended) who, in the film’s climax, engages in a chainsaw swordfight with the nefarious Leatherface. This is a movie where the cannibal Sawyer family lives under an abandoned amusement park, and runs an award-winning “barbeque” truck that serves up human remains. This is a movie about “teenage” Leatherface’s sexual awakening. This is a movie where the theatrical onesheet featured the grotesque cast in a pose which mimicked the iconic poster for TheBreakfast Club (1985)!

If you turned your head and squinted, there was a level of black humor present in the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre. (Very, very black humor.) But, it was nothing like the nonstop yuck-fest—both “yuck” as in funny, and “yuck” as in gory—which its sequel turned out to be. While The Evil Dead (1981) took itself more seriously than its remake-slash-sequel, Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987), there were a number of laughs to be found in the first film, and the added humor felt like a natural progression on director Sam Raimi’s part. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, on the other hand, feels like a parody of Tobe Hooper’s original film, which is more or less how he and screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson intended it.

“In a sense, the film is about Leatherface in love. This is Leatherface’s coming-of-age picture,” Carson told Cinefantastique.

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