Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006)

I can't believe after all the years doing this blog, I'm still reviewing Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies. I know what you're thinking – couldn't you just, like, stop reviewing them, then? The answer is yes, yes I could. But that would be so much less fun in that sweet schadenfraude way. I have to do this. It's just how it is.

Director: Jonathan Liebesman

Starring: R. Lee Ermey, Jordana Brewster

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

This is a prequel to the 2003 remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is a real feat of confidence, as the gall it must take to assume anyone cared about that piece of shit movie and wanted to know more is far greater than anything I've ever felt.

This one starts off with a woman giving birth in the middle of a meat packing plant, which as everyone knows is exactly how you birth a serial killer. I'm glad they showed us this because I never would have known how Leatherface was born if they didn't and that was always the worst thing about the original movie. The way humans are born is just a total mystery to me so I'm glad this movie is setting the record straight on that!

Then we flash forward like 20 years to the same meat packing plant, now closing down, I assume, to become a vegetarian meat packing plant. Damn new trends... actually it's because of financial woes, I guess. For some reason, Leatherface is working there right as it's closing down – he's working in the exact same place he was born. I wonder what that's like... must be weird.

Then we learn by watching the manager that it's a bad idea to insult a mentally handicapped giant with a hammer in his hand while you're all alone in close proximity in the dark – it doesn't turn out well for him, to say the least.

And we see how he gets his infamous chainsaw – he just picks it up off the table at the meat factory as he's leaving. What an Earth shattering revelation. I am amazed how these writers were able to tie together the rich history of that chainsaw throughout multiple movies.

The main characters this time around are totally different from the last movie. Instead of a bunch of really attractive people, it's a bunch of really attractive people who have a few lines in the movie about going to Vietnam to fight a war. What a change! I guess these two guys are brothers and one of them doesn't want to go back to the war. Yeah, this is awesome. I watch slasher horror movies for serious plots about Vietnam war draft dodgers. I'm weird like that!

I do like the one scene of the brother tied up about to have sex with his girlfriend, and then he can't do it at the last minute because he's thinking about his brother too much. An every day occurrence I'm sure. Maybe producer Michael Bay is working some stuff out with scenes like this.

This is the time for deep thinking...

So I guess the Leatherface family, helmed again by R. Lee Ermey's Sheriff Hoyt character, are upset that the meat factory closed down because, I guess, this will mean the town is taken over by hippies and bikers? What a weird correlation. Except then we see that they're right – bikers just magically appear in town. Right on cue!

Did they sprout from the ground like mutated weeds? What the hell?

What follows is an incredibly strange scene in which this one woman biker chases the heroes on a motorcycle on the road with a giant gun to rob them – because I guess the movie forgot that this is TCM and not fucking Mad Max. But to be fair, a Mad Max sequel would be way better than this movie.

I liked her better when her name was Sarah Connor.

There's also an insane car crash that flips the car over and shatters several windows, yet the people inside don't break any bones or show much injury at all save for some blood on their heads! Man is that gonna be a mess! Damn car crashes.

It'll take hours to wash this off and put makeup back on! Fucking car crashes!

Hoyt shows up and kills the biker girl though, kidnapping three of the main characters – both brothers and the blonde chick. The other girl is not kidnapped because she was instead thrown out of the car in that crash earlier, yet she's perfectly fine and without a scratch on her! Because, I guess they can't have anything that ruins her hotness at all, lest they lose the interest of the people they delusionally think are watching.

The next forty minutes of this movie is all a bunch of torture porn nonsense. Really nothing scary at all – just gore and torture crap, which is almost always awful no matter what. A few highlights:

There's a needless scene where Hoyt makes the one brother do push-ups and then keeps hitting him while he's down. It goes on waaaay too long and has no point – Ermey's character just isn't well written enough to make it work as a tense scene. It's kinda gross and weird, but not scary or tense in the least. Plus being in broad daylight makes it kind of lame.

He's in the military and can barely do any push ups. Weird.

The main girl teams up with this lone biker guy to go save everyone, and their brilliant plan is of course to go do it alone. No point in even trying to get help, because what would THAT accomplish? You know, except for an awesome scene where a bunch of badass bikers fight Leatherface? That would actually be a cool scene, but what do we get? Just more of the same boring crap.

Instead, the biker shoots this old man in the family and then is butchered by Leatherface in an extremely predictable manner – it is always amazing to me how horror movie scripts do these tired, predictable scenes over and over like this. Do they think we all just have amnesia and really don't know what's going to happen at every fucking turn? I really want to meet the ideal person they think is going to watch this: “Holy fuck, I never expected him to jump out at that extremely obvious moment! What avant garde film technique!”

It's gory, but is it scary? No. No it isn't. That would require actual suspense and stuff we haven't seen a hundred times over.

Then Hoyt decides to make Leatherface cut off the old guy's legs, both of them, because he was shot in one of them. Even the other family members seem baffled by this, which is the real Litmus test for what a piece of shit you are, if the Leatherface family thinks you've gone too far.

So while the 2003 remake skipped out on the dinner scene so infamous in the original film, THIS one decided to put it in for no logical reason at all! Better late than never I guess, even when it makes no sense. Except I guess to establish that... the family is crazy and has always been crazy, since they apparently do this constantly? What an astute judgment of their characters. Why aren't the writers working in the field of clinical psychology?

"We could just kill you now, but that would make no sense for our plan of making no sense. We're just crazy! So we do nonsensical things!"

Hoyt gets beaten up with his head smashed against the floor several times, which looks pretty bad. It was mentioned at some point that he was in the Korean war – so can this just be a Jacob's Ladder scenario where none of this movie happened and it's all in his head as he's dying? Both of those things would be the best case scenario for me.

Then the main girl escapes and goes running through another meat factory, exactly like in the end of the 2003 remake. I wonder if the Leatherface family feels weird about their lives repeating all these moments over and over again, verbatim, like they're trapped in a Hellish loop.

Perhaps the silliest part of all is when she finds this car and gets in, only for Leatherface to suddenly pop up in the back seat after several minutes of driving and kill her. How did she NOT see him back there? He's a seven foot tall fucking giant with a chainsaw. That car isn't that big – it's not like he had a lot of room. So what the fuck, right? I don't feel bad at all about her dying because of this.

"I am very quiet and flexible enough to fit into small places. Isn't that cool?" 

I turned to Nathan before this happened, as she was getting in the car, and was like, wouldn't it be funny if he just popped up in the car behind her like Michael Myers? We laughed about it. Then it happened. That's pretty bad. How dare this movie appease the ridiculous whims of my imagination?

Then Leatherface gets out of the car and walks away into the complete black darkness on the other side of the road. Why is it like that? Can't they put in some fucking street lights over there?

She crashes her car into a state trooper and kills him - some street light could've prevented this tragedy.

Seriously, though, what's the point of anything in this? It's supposedly a prequel to show what happened before the Texas Chainsaw story, but it doesn't do anything but give us a rehash of the same shit we already know about. Oh, but there's a two-second scene of him being born and then finding a chainsaw! The audience was really too dumb to piece THOSE things together!

The rest of it is just boring. The original was good because the violence felt real and they didn't just shove blood and guts in your face from people tied to tables. This one is a bunch of torture porn gore garbage. Fuck this.

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Review: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

Director: Tobe Hooper

Starring: Marilyn Burns, Allen Danziger, Paul A. Partain, William Vail, Teri McMinn, Gunnar Hansen

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072271/

I believe this serves as sort of an instruction manual – a blueprint, if you will, for horror films…if you’re asking how to start one off, how about with a grim, seedy black backdrop while a scrolling text tells the audience that what they’re about to see is an account of some teenagers who witness something truly horrible and tragic:

"The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths, in particular Sally Hardesty and her invalid brother, Franklin. It is all the more tragic in that they were young. But, had they lived very, very long lives, they could not have expected nor would they have wished to see as much of the mad and macabre as they were to see that day. For them an idyllic summer afternoon drive became a nightmare. The events of that day were to lead to the discovery of one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre."

It sets an atmosphere incredibly well, and is only furthered by the weed-ridden, dusty Texas outback setting that we’re dumped into next. Everything is untrustworthy and suspicious as hell. Then we get introduced to the characters – they’re all fairly interchangeable hippy types, except for Franklin, who is an invalid and needs help getting around in a wheelchair. They’re going out to the Texas lowlands to visit their grandfather’s grave. However, this turns out to not be a good idea. Especially when they pick up a hitchhiker who cuts his hand open and sets things on fire – I think that means it’s time to kick him out, guys. Sooner than you did, at least.

Just look at this setting. Has there ever been one more fitting of a horror film? I don’t think there has. It’s just such a desolate, unsettling setting; this broken down husk of a house way out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by unfriendly woods. Pure terror. The kids all split up to explore the house, on top of the world and believing they can never really be hurt, and that’s when they’re struck down. There’s a ton of atmosphere bleeding out of every inch of this scene as they explore the grounds of this weird back country Texas lot. It’s weird, it’s minimalistic and it sets a better atmosphere than any other horror movie at the time, and even better than many in the future.

Until a giant in a skin mask appears out of nowhere and murders them all individually with hammers, chainsaws and meat hooks.

I cannot even imagine what it must have been like to see this in 1974. Even today it’s scary as shit! I mean…wow! This is just such a stark, cold-blooded scene. There’s no emotion there at all; it’s just pure, detached slaughter. Imagining what’s going through his head is even scarier, because he’s just so unpredictable. Leatherface is like a child here, and the shot when he’s sitting in that beam of light by the window is one of the best in the film. He looks at you with those blank eyes and that half-open mouth full of deformed teeth, and you’re trapped in the movie’s world for good. Nothing will ever be the same again. After this dead-end point the movie becomes a complete nightmare on all sides.

An eternity in the dark follows – chased through the woods by a chainsaw-wielding maniac. Listen to the sounds of their screams and that revving, rusty sawblade. How can you possibly have any hope? The scene where Franklin is butchered is another masterwork of complete, bile-spewing terror. Completely void of any kind of emotion, and for that, scarier than almost anything in mainstream horror cinema since.

Then we get the scene where she goes back to the gas station from earlier in the movie, hysterical, screaming for help. Good, right? Maybe she’ll finally get some help out in this insane miasma of Southern weeds and dirt and blood…maybe someone will help her out and get her to safety, the poor girl. Oh, wait, no; the guy at the gas station is in on it. Isn’t that just the ultimate gut-punch in this situation? The one guy she actually finds out in this backdoor of the world is in on the whole thing and he takes her right back to the bloody mayhem from where she already came. Look at that scene where he’s got her tied up with a bag over her head and he keeps prodding her with the broom handle. Sickening…

And of course what comes next is the Big Horrific Payoff. Because there’s no way to end these movies other than with a bang. You have to escalate the terror to its breaking point and then push it further; that’s the only way to do it. And TCM does exactly that when it puts the lead girl tied up in a chair in the middle of a room full of yammering wackos who could kill her at any minute. This scene has been influential to countless horror movies, the biggest of which being Evil Dead and House of a Thousand Corpses off the top of my head. Just pure, unadulterated chaos. Points for those creepy, bugged out shots of her eyes as her mind breaks. Just chilling. We then get the classic, iconic scene where Leatherface chases her out of the house and starts spinning around with his chainsaw as she gets away with a truck driver. It’s cool. And it is the perfect way to send off this grave, unforgettable masterpiece of the genre.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is just a classic. It’s not one of those dull movies that you call a classic because it’s old and important; no – this is still a landmark of fear and paranoia. This could be you; that’s what’s so scary about this. It could be you out there lost in the Texas outback, and nobody would ever hear from you again. Therein lies true fear. All posers beware.

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Review: Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1994)

The Man Responsible: Kim Henkel

Victims (Careers May or May Not have Survived): Renee Zellweger, Matthew McConaughey, Leatherface

IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110978/

“Girls have tits.”

-Barry

Okay, so I got one horrible Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel out of the way; how about another one? How about a movie so bad that it makes even long-term fans of the rest of the series cringe? Yes, that’s right, people who actually support Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, shun this movie. People who actually thought that was a good piece of cinema… this is the movie they don’t like of the series. How bad can Tex-ass Chainsaw Massacre get? Well, let’s take a look at The Next Generation, which more or less means ‘here’s a crappy 90s sequel that attempts to half-assedly modernize an old horror franchise with stupid characters and banal attempts at humor.’

First of all, if that title isn’t going to have anything to do with Star Trek, I don’t want a part of this movie. Second…did we just enter a parallel dimension or something? I’ll do a quick rundown of just the first five minutes: Weird montage of a girl and her boyfriend getting ready at home, taking pictures and then going to a high school prom. Cut to two guys wrestling in the parking lot. Cut to this one blonde girl named Heather asking a teacher where her boyfriend Barry is, to which the teacher says, “I thought you two broke up?” I’m sorry…but what the hell does that have to do with anything? Couldn't you just tell her the answer? Keep your nose out of her business! Then Heather talks to her friend, who is muttering gibberish for absolutely no reason and twitching like she has Tourette’s…although she stops doing that and does not appear to actually have said disease. Then Heather finds Barry kissing some other girl, steals his car and goes careening across the parking lot. But somehow he gets in the car and they start talking.

He says that she’s so controlling and won’t let him see his friends anymore, even though everyone in the audience and her clearly saw him kissing and feeling up another girl. He says that he needs sex and that there’s “nothing wrong with kissing another girl once.” Uh…YES THERE IS, YOU MONGOLOID. And then the kids from the opening scene, Jenny and Sean, from the first scene pop up spontaneously in the back of the car even though they weren’t shown ever getting in, and were just seen a few seconds ago coming out of the doors of the dance. They talk about…okay, okay, wait. I need a second here.

Five minutes. Five minutes is all it took for this movie to break me. I mean WOW, man, that’s a new record right there! This is like an M. Night Shyamalan movie...if it was on steroids.

So they get in two car crashes – don’t you know you’re not supposed to drive angry? – while Barry delivers such witty lines as “Girls have tits.” Startling observation there, Sherlock; how long did it take you to figure that one out? The second crash actually stops them cold and they even find an unconscious guy in the other car. Then they go looking out in the woods for help…instead of just going back the way they came for some reason. Your guess is as good as mine why that is. They just…randomly barge in on this weird little wood-office place where the lady at the desk starts talking to Jenny about random stuff while she calls her friend Vilmer.

…who arrives at the scene of the accident where Sean is waiting. Sean asks if Vilmer can take a look at the unconscious guy, and Vilmer promptly slits his throat. He stands up and announces that he is going to kill Sean too, and then…Sean disappears. I can infer that he ran away from Vilmer, but I don’t hear any running sound effects, and I sure didn’t see him run away, so what the hell, movie? What, is this like some kind of visual fun-house mirror or something; just twisting our perceptions of reality by including normal looking people and situations but making them just a little strange and out of focus? My brain is being raped by this movie. I haven’t even gotten to the chainsaw wielding cannibals, and my brain is being raped.

We see Vilmer chasing Sean with his truck and playing around with him before actually backing up and hitting him. What happened to him? Is he really dead? I guess we won’t find those things out before the movie’s whimsical sense of fucked up magic decides we need to know! Our three other characters are wandering through the woods when Vilmer speeds by them and does not respond to their cries for help. Jenny wanders off into the woods, deciding she doesn’t want to be a part of this movie for a while, while Barry and Heather exchange…some of the most fascinating dialogue I’ve heard in a long time.

I’m dead serious! Just read some of these quotes:

Heather: Let's stop and ask for help. Tell them we'll give them fifty bucks if they give us a ride.

Barry: Fifty bucks?

Heather: We're not really gonna GIVE it to 'em, tell 'em to send us a bill. If they get mad...give them five bucks, tell em we'll send the rest later.

...I'm sorry, what? Why are you talking about that? It's like completely out of left field with what is actually going on, like looking at a picture of a hot girl to stare at her right earlobe.

And later on…

Barry: You better not shoot me, mister. I heard this guy pulled a gun on a kid at his house, and he got tried for murder.

...Yeah, man! You stick it to him!

There is too many of these lines for me to even count, let alone write down or comment about. So how about we take a look at the next scene…Heather is sitting on the bench waiting for Barry to look around for people to help them. This ratty old man in a mask and a dirty trench coat comes up behind her and starts picking her hair. She makes no sign of even noticing him. We cut to the scene above where Barry is confronted by a man with a gun. We cut back, and she still hasn’t noticed. She finally notices this huge guy who was probably breathing down her neck the whole time, and we see it’s Leatherface!

But that doesn’t trouble me nearly as much as how much this girl screams. I’m really starting to hate girls screaming in these movies; it’s so annoying. It even annoys Leatherface! Good job, movie, you created a character that could aggravate a seven-foot serial killer who wears other peoples’ faces. That takes talent. But he kills both of them off anyway.

Meanwhile, Vilmer is playing cat and mouse with Jenny, who is still stranded in the woods. He shows her the dead bodies of Sean and the unconscious car-crash victim in the back of his truck, spouts some pseudo-existentialist philosophy and then chases her into the woods, only to leave again. Gee, you’d think a guy with that kind of imagination would have something better to do on a Friday night. She then gets chased by Leatherface until she gets back to the little house from before, where she gets cattle-prodded and tied up by the lady who she thought was a good guy, and a man who does nothing but quote famous intellectuals.

Phew.

The movie trudges along and we see the cops completely ignoring the crazy woman with Jenny tied up in her trunk - If someone, even a hot and flirty girl, says to you "You don't want to know" when you ask what's in their trunk...you probably need to check it out. That is your job, you frigging retard. And then we see the woman hitting the escaped (???) Heather, who we presumed was dead since she had a hook stuck in her last time we saw her, with a stick for no reason. But for some reason, she does not actually take Heather back with them, despite that she tells Vilmer to go find her when they arrive at the house…but then, brace yourselves! WE GET A CROSS-DRESSING LEATHERFACE.

I’m…I’m at a loss for words. They don’t even say anything about it. Before he was wearing regular clothes and now he’s wearing a grandma’s wig and an apron! Why? I don’t know. He never did that in any of the other movies. And later on we even see him in a full dress and lipstick and everything! And you know what the strangest part is? I’m not even that surprised! That’s right; I’m not surprised. That’s how far this movie has driven me. They showed a classic horror icon CROSS DRESSING, and I wasn’t surprised. Movie, go lobotomize yourself with a rusty chainsaw.

I can’t summarize the rest of this. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just…I’ve covered so much of this already, and the rest of the movie basically amounts to Vilmer and the Leatherface family shouting, beating each other up and doing everything short of throwing their own feces; it’s like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre if they went on Jerry Springer. Oh yeah, and there’s a plot thrown in in the last fifteen minutes about the Illuminati. Color me surprised!

This is amazing. It is so absolutely awful and simultaneously perplexing in every way that it is flat out amazing. I have no idea what this movie is trying to get across. I have no idea what the audience for this was. Sometimes it’s trying to be funny, but there aren’t any jokes so much as…random, weird conversations. And the rest of the time? Well, uh, it’s nothing you ever want to see again. None of this movie is. Don’t get me wrong; this is bad, one of the worst out there, but at the same time…go see this if you have 90 minutes to waste. It’s really a spectacle of a film. A movie as flippantly, whimsically weird as it is godawfully horrendous and ear-rapingly annoying. You decide which one is more prevalent.

Now I’m going to go have my eyes gouged out to forget this whole thing.

Review: Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

Director: Tobe Hooper

Starring: Dennis Hopper, Caroline Williams, Bill Moseley, Bill Johnson

IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092076/

The legend goes that 13 years after the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, they finally decided to make a sequel. And it sucks. It sucks hard. Do you need more?

Our movie starts with a few seconds of text recounting the legend of the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie, and thusly reminding us of how good that one was. We then go to an open country road where some dork wearing kooky prism-sunglasses is shooting a gun out the window for no reason. He and his companion call up a sexy radio hostess named Stretch, whose name is clearly ripe for any number of sexual innuendos, and joke around with her while playing chicken with some poor shmuck who was probably just trying to get home and eat lunch or something. Gee, listen to the way that prism-sunglasses kid is laughing…it’s like audible AIDS. He gives off this really shrill, piercing laugh that I actually think is exploding my---

Oh, hey, radio girl is playing The Cramps. That’s much better. Thank you, movie.

Buuuut it’s not long before we switch right back to the two asshole brothers who want to prank-call her again, because they clearly have nothing better to do on their trip to the Texas low country than prank call innocent people and make their lives that much more annoying. Well, movie, I’ve got to give you credit; you’ve already made me want to kill these guys myself! I can’t wait till Leatherface does it later.

And luckily we don’t have to wait that long, as he actually shows up on the road a second later and attacks them after the driver calls him a pig-fucker and tells him to back up – which Leatherface does, right before he gets out his chainsaw and cuts their car to pieces while it’s already moving. For some reason he’s wearing a weird zombie-scarecrow costume or something that covers his face, even though it falls off and you can see it’s him; that’s fucking weird. And the whole thing gets caught on Stretch’s radio tape…

The next morning we get introduced to our main character, played by Dennis Hopper. Yup, Dennis Hopper again; he’s been appearing in almost every god damn movie I’ve watched lately, like he’s fucking haunting me or something. He’s playing a washed up sheriff who has been hunting the Texas Chainsaw Massacre killers ever since the first movie and none of the other cops really take him seriously or believe anything he says. But Stretch comes to talk to him and try to help him, and he refuses…I guess he just doesn’t like publicity that much.

So then we go to a Chili Cook Off where a famous chef is winning for the second year in a row. “It’s the meat,” he says, when asked what his secret is to making it so good, with a twinkle in his eye. Gee, that couldn’t possibly be foreshadowing the fact that he’s probably a bad guy and is using cut-up humans killed by Leatherface to make it, could it? Not that I’ve ever seen this movie. Just a healthy bit of speculation, mmm.

After buying a chainsaw at the World Chainsaw Emporium, Hopper goes to meet with Stretch the radio girl at her house, apparently having changed his mind as he wants her to play the tape of the two morons getting killed on the radio for everyone to hear…he says it’s so that the law will realize that he’s not just a joke, but really, I think it would just get her in huge amounts of trouble and probably even set Hopper back further, but hey, what do I know, I haven’t been chasing the Leatherface family for 14 years. And he introduces himself as Lefty. That’s right; our crime fighting team in this movie is named Stretch and Lefty. Why does that sound more like a bad comic strip you’d find in the Sunday papers or something?

So Stretch plays the horrific murder noises on the air for everyone to hear, and that guy from the Chili competition hears it from someone on the phone while driving a truck that only Kurt Russell from Big Trouble in Little China would drive. Oh, and it doesn’t matter, but he’s actually driving with the chili open and sitting on the Texas-shaped trophy he won sitting next to him in the passenger seat. That’s…really strange. Then that night after Stretch is all alone, she gets ambushed by Bill Moseley, playing one of the Leatherface family. He stumbles around chewing the scenery and acting like a ham until Leatherface pops out of the records room, where he’s apparently been hiding this whole time – gee, how did he even stay put that long? I thought he was like some kind of barbaric savage who couldn’t do those kinds of things to save his life.

I have to admit there are a few good scenes in this whole thing that do invite a few scares and some tension. Like when Leatherface corners Stretch in the room and runs his chainsaw up her leg…but for the most part the silliness of Bill Moseley and the temper tantrums of Leatherface afterward kind of drag it down.

So then Stretch decides to follow them. While she’s driving, apparently the sound guy for the movie was so bored that he decided to put in goofy, over the top music that has nothing to do with the TCM franchise. And why the hell is she following them? What, she couldn’t just alert the law enforcement? I know they didn’t believe anything had really happened, but come on, lady, YOU COULD HAVE SHOWN THEM YOUR WRECKED UP RADIO STATION. That’s veritable proof right there! You don’t have to go after them alone, you frigging idiot!

She gets chased by a car that is driven by Hopper, imagine that, and she ends up standing right in the very spot where there’s a trap-door to cave in the ground on her. Hopper gets out his chainsaw and starts screaming his head off as he goes to attack the Leatherface family madhouse, which is full of things like giant statues of hands holding knives, twisty slides like you’d find on a playground and walls that are full of fresh human entrails – weird family decoration, but I’ll go with it. But man, Hopper is a terrible cop. Does he just go in screaming and shouting every time he wants to apprehend a suspect? Imagine how that would have worked in Silence of the Lambs. He would have been dead in two seconds. He really doesn’t think this is going to, uh, alert anyone of his presence and possibly get him killed? Well, again, I guess I’m not the expert here. He probably knows best.

Hey, kids, let’s play PLOT ROULETTE! This is a game where we spin the great wheel of movie sequel plots and see what we’re going to have to deal with. Today’s plot wheel winner is…the sympathetic serial killer! Yes, Leatherface actually falls in love with Stretch, and tries to hide her from his crazy family by putting the face of her dead best friend over hers and also putting his hat on her head, too, and then tying her up so she doesn’t get away. It turns out he’s still alive, though, even though his face was skinned off…and actually, what follows is a really touching scene that’s also equally hard to watch and brutal, as he stumbles around, having been beaten within an inch of his life and had his face cut off. He manages to untie her and even talk a little, but he falls over and dies. This scene is actually really sad, and one of the only moments in this damn movie that actually evokes some kind of emotion.

But ugh…then we have to go back to watching Bill Moseley and that Chili cook guy who is apparently the head of the family. These two characters are so damn annoying and grating to the ears that they had me hoping that Dennis Hopper would show back up again. Hell, even Stretch herself is hardly sympathetic anymore. All she does is scream and she’s the one who got herself into this whole thing in the first place, so what the hell should I feel sorry for her for? Luckily Hopper does show up – although any protagonist whose choice of attack is a chainsaw to the other guy’s ass as he runs away is kind of questionable, but I’ll overlook that if we can get this movie done with faster.

I think one of the funnier parts is how Dennis Hopper has this armory of chainsaws, all of different sizes, tucked into his uniform like guns or knives or something – I’m not sure they’re supposed to be used like that, dude. And FINALLY Stretch kills Bill Moseley and puts the audience out of their misery of his horrible performance. In a startlingly cartoonish climax, the old grandpa throws a hammer at Dennis Hopper, who ducks, so it hits Leatherface, who falls over and knocks the floor in on the Chili cook guy, who loses control of the bomb he was about to explode.

Wow. Did we just enter the fucking Looney Tunes?

But no, the movie isn’t done torturing us yet, so Bill Moseley comes back and fights with Stretch some more until she finally knocks him down the mountain and into a pipe like he’s a golf ball at a mini golf course. Phew.

This just sucks. It’s got a few redeeming factors and a couple scenes that were okay, but for the most part, it just sucks. It completely eschews the tension and atmosphere of the first movie by putting in a bunch of annoying fuckholes screaming and cackling all the time and it gets rid of the cool Texas outback setting in favor of a carnival funhouse that just isn’t nearly as impressive. There’s just nothing about this that works or creates any kind of fear. The acting is over the top and annoying, the plot is just boring and…well, that’s all I need to tell you why this sucks. I guess in between the first one and this one, director Tobe Hooper lost his marbles or just stopped giving a shit, because this just isn't any good at all. If you see a copy of this, spit on it. That's all, folks!