With the Oklahoma/Texas game this weekend, it’s been a tradition. It’s a wonderful time to look at the great misstep that is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. The movie is set around the Red River Rivalry.
Two teenage hell-raisers Rick (Chris Douridas) and Buzz (Barry Kinyon) are driving along a Texas roadway to the Dallas Cotton Bowl when they use a car phone in Buzz’s Mercedes to call in to a radio station K-OKLA where Vanita “Stretch” Brock (Caroline Williams) is the on-air deejay. Suddenly the two teens get in a road rage incident with a van that turns out to have Leatherface (Bill Johnson) as a passenger who murders the two. Stretch ends up recording the whole thing as the Mercedes crashes near Dallas.
Lt. Boude “Lefty” Enright (Dennis Hopper) is a retired Texas Ranger who is also the uncle of Sally and Franklin Hardestry, characters from the first movie. Lefty has long believed Sally’s claims about the murderous cannibalistic Sawyer family. Yet over the years law enforcement all over the Lone Star have refused to believe certain unsolved murders are related. A title card over the beginning indicates no one was to find any evidence of what Sally claimed.
Lefty is contacted by Stretch who says she has audio of the murder and later plays it on the radio station. But she also covers the Texas/Oklahoma Chili Cookoff where Dreyton Sawyer (Jim Siedow) wins. Director Tobe Hooper changes up the tone adding more comedic elements. Some work and some don’t. A contest announcer takes a bite of the chili only to discover a human tooth which Dreyton sheepishly says is a peppercorn.
For the most part, I understand what Hooper and writer L.M. Kit Carson were doing. I’ve never been a fan of the whole franchise because there’s only so much you can do about killers chasing people around with chainsaws. With the original, they were trying to make a cheap exploitation flick. The acting wasn’t the best. The pacing feels off. But the movie had a look and tone to it no one had seen before.
Hooper left out a lot of gruesome violence because he wanted that movie to get a PG rating but it had a different effect thus going unrated to avoid an X rating. The same is with this movie released 40 years ago in 1986.
Horror movies were being treated badly by critics and the public by this time. TCM had helped lay the foundation of the explosion of horror in the 1980s. The filmmakers were just having some fun. But they were having too much fun that the movie painfully drags in its second half.
When Stretch plays the audio on the airwaves, she gets visited by Leatherface and Chop Top (Bill Moseley) another member of the Sawyer clan. Moseley steals the show as a Vietnam vet eith a metal plate in his head that he hides with a Sonny Bono wig. He also has a tendency to scratch it with a wire coat hanger that he sometimes warms up with a cigarette lighter. Moseley walks a fine line between making Chop Top a comedic figure and sadistic madman. It’s reported Michael Keaton was inspired by Chop Top when he played Betelgeuse.
I feel that even though Hooper had a bigger budget, he was still restricted by funding. Following the success of Poltergeist in 1982, he signed a three-picture deal with The Cannon Group which was notorious for its shady practices. Most of the action takes place in the radio station and an abandoned amusement park where the Sawyer clan now lives. The opening sequence on the road sets a great tone for a movie that can never keep up.
Williams is fun to watch as Stretch and Hopper is playing a nicer guy but he has a psychotic match with the Sawyers. But some parts of the movie just seem to be the cast overacting. Comedy can be hard and comedy-horror (or is it horror-comedy?) can be harder. The movie’s theatrical poster parodying The Breakfast Club told people not to take it seriously.
But you have to take comedy serioisly enough. At about 100 minutes with credits, this is the longest entry in the franchise. For a movie that prominently features chainsaws, some serious cuts needed to be made to it.
What do you think? Please comment.
