The Best Sequel Ever Made*
“It’s like death eating a cracker, isn’t it?”
–Bill Mosley as Chop-Top in THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2
SPIDER-MAN 2. THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. THE GODFATHER: PART II. Those are only a few of the small handful of sequels that surpassed the expectations of the original. They are also some of my most favorite films of all time. I mean, I’ll take the Hoth snowbunny Princess Leia over slave-girl Leia any day. But when most film fanatics start talking about great sequels, they tend to overlook Tobe Hooper’s TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 for some reason, despite having the lovely Caroline Williams rocking a pair of cutoff jeans almost as good as Daisy Duke. And I know that’s not the only reason the film should be counted as a masterpiece, but it certainly doesn’t hurt anything if you judge it on that alone. It certainly worked for me as a young man all of nineteen years of age in the summer of 1986. Hell, it still works now for for that matter. What can I say? When it comes to horror movies, I have my priniples after all.
1985 and 1986 were good years for unrated horror flicks making their way into movie theaters. In the summer of ’85, Beth and I spent half of George Romero’s apocalyptic zombie flick, DAY OF THE DEAD, heavy petting while zombies bit people and made Manwiches our of their intestines. Since it was unrated, nobody under the age of seventeen was supposed to go into the theater without a parent or guardian. But seeing how I was eighteen and Beth was only fourteen at the time, I guess I counted as a guardian, even though my hands spent half the flick between her legs. We were close to the front and the half dozen or so people left in the audience were behind us, so I don’t think anybody really knew what we were up to. We were young, hormonal, and watching a movie that had no ratings boundaries. It was the closest I ever got to true drive-in culture and I took every advantage of the situation. To this day, that movie is still a conversation piece between Beth and I. So I’m not going to start apologizing for my actions now. I felt her up while the zombies pulled poor Joe Pilato’s legs off and I’m proud of it! And I think she enjoyed it, too. 😉
Things were a little more subdued when I saw THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 a year later with my best friend’s sister. Lisa B. and I had started to hang around a little more once her brother had gone off and gotten himself some new Wiccan friends. Left out the loop, we started going to the camp in Maine together a little more and just generally started hanging out. It was never a romantic thing, although I probably wouldn’t have been adverse to it at that point. It just didn’t seem right is all. She was like my little sister, too. But she was woefully unprepared for the unrated cut of TCM2 that hit Cinema 95 that summer. She screamed and clutched my arm. Which was fine. Girls plus horror films usually equaled some spontaneous grabbing, so I was used to it. But while she was screaming, I was laughing. Right then and there I knew I wasn’t seeing the film the same as everybody else. Which meant I had become desensitized to all the violence like all those cut-rate pop psychologists had been warning, or people just weren’t getting it. I’m gonna have to go with option “B” on this one.
TCM2, as it was released, was not the film Tobe Hooper wanted to make in 1986. He and original TCM screenwriter Kim Henkel had envisioned a movie where a whole town’s population was taken up by chainsaw cannibal killers. But the studio balked and asked for a new screenwriter and a new script. So instead of a bigger rehash of the 1974 film, Hooper and new screen writer, L.M. Kit Carson, whittled the story down and turned it into a black comedy. Gone was the guerrilla style cinematography and the documentary feel that made the original a 1970s drive-in sensation. Fangoria Magazine was picking up fanboy steam right around this time and special effects gore ruled horror cinema. So they brought in Tom Savini (DAWN OF THE DEAD, DAY OF THE DEAD, etc.) for some of the most bombastic, over the top effects ever put on film. They also gave the chainsaw family a back story. No longer did the family prowl around rural Texas carving up unsuspecting teenagers. Instead, their victims were used as supplies for the family’s “Last Roundup Rolling Grill”, an RV that the cook (played by a wonderfully befuddled Jim Siedow in his last role) from the original film would drive all around Texas to win regional chili cook-off contests. The whole operation in turn funded by Bill Moseley’s “Chop-Top”, the retro throwback/Vietnam vet twin brother of the first film’s hitchhiker character. Chop-Top had a portion of his head taken off in-country, so he’s been getting disability checks from the government for the metal plate in his head. The money, in turn, gets pumped into the rolling grill and an abandoned theme park called “Texas Battle Land” that serves as part smokehouse, part storage space for the hundreds of dead bodies the family has done in over the years. Hooper and Carson took a look at the mall society building up around them and decided the chainsaw family should cash in, too. “Biggest meat eater we get of the month,” screams Sideow at his demented sidekicks, knowing that most of their customers are at the Texas/Oklahoma football game. “And we’re gonna lose money on him!” But they still carve up their victim anyway. Time is money and you have to keep the operation going in order to fend off competition from other cash happy caterers because “the small business man always takes it in the ass”. It’s a hysterical premise, having these psychotic killers more worried about croissant sandwiches than their victims. But at the same time, there’s a lot of ghastly imagery in there that is very reminiscent of the old E.C. Comics of the 1950s. It’s almost like Hooper knew he couldn’t compete with the legend of his own 1974 film, so he tore it all down and rebuilt it as something so wild and far-fetched that the audiences were going have to wind up talking about it one way or the other. I can only think of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and its follow up, HANNIBAL, as the same kind of creative self-sabotage. When something gets too big, destroy it. That’s what I think Hooper was going for with this one. And he almost did it, too. The movie tanked when it first came out and loyal CHAINSAW fans disowned it. But it finally found it’s audience on VHS, and managed to get banned in a few countries in the process. Now, among horror fans at least, it’s considered a classic black comedy. Sort of like what the Marx Brothers would’ve been like if they had started snacking on people.
Unfortunately, though, there is a slightly disappointing element to the film. The character of Leatherface, who was utterly remorseless with his killing in the first movie, is reduced to a caricature of himself in the sequel. He develops a fascination with Caroline Williams that turns fetishistic in one scene when he grinds a stalled chainsaw blade against her clothed vagina. Then, just as the “pleasure” gets to be too much, he tries to start the hardware to seal the deal and can’t get it started again. So basicallyyou have this big bulky monster turns out to be pretty impotent in this offering. It’s almost too human. He lets Caroline Williams go and that act ultimately becomes the family’s weak spot. I dunno. It’s the one thing that just doesn’t fit here and it kind of ruins what actor Gunnar Hansen did with the character in the first film. Originally, Leatherface had been based on murderer Ed Gein and had rightfully been played with a hint of femininity by Hansen. In TCM2, that little piece of subtext is thrown out the window for a killer who compensates his lack of size with a big-ass chainsaw. Sideow makes up for this part of Hooper’s deconstruction of the chainsaw mythos with some great one-liners near the climax film, so all is not lost, especially since we have Moseley expertly covering lost ground in the insanity department throughout. I just think Leatherface is one of those sacred things in horror movie filmdom that should not be fucked with, mostly out of respect for Gunnar Hansen, who can do more with his eyes in one scene than some Academy Award winners out there. But that’s just me.
So what does all of this have to do with the price of beef in Texas? I dunno. I guess since it’s now officially Halloween, I’m turning a bit
nostalgic and wishing I had some of my old movie-going pals with me here to sit down, make a batch of popcorn, and watch some psycho zombie chainsaw killing mayhem. Or, at the very least, one girl to rub me the right way while the undead infect the living. But, alas, the wife is asleep and I’m 1,000 miles away from the people who understand me the most this time a year. All I’ve got is this bag of Orville Redenbacher in front of me and my old VHS tape of TCM2. I guess it will have to do for now.
“Dog will hunt!”
Bill Moseley makes his introduction as Chop-Top.