Franchises: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

When I first saw both the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the 2003 remake, I initially decided to go no further into the franchise, mainly because of the mixed to negative general consensus on the original's sequels, which ranged from them considered to just not be very good to their having "crapped" on the awesomeness of the original, made a mockery of it, and not even counting in the long run. For a little while (as in six months), I kept that initiative, but when I was shopping around for my eighteenth birthday in the summer of 2005 (I always ask my family to just give me money so I can buy whatever I want for myself), I came upon the DVDs for both the second and third films, decided, "What the heck?", and went ahead and got them. Like the original, I had seen the theatrical trailer for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 after scanning its DVD at FYE, but that one wasn't nearly as impactful, beginning with a narrator talking about how Leatherface had now come out of hiding after having vanished thirteen years before, and then showing a very quick montage of crazed clips that gave no indication of the story, before ending with the narrator declaring, "The buzz is back!", and that it was another film by Tobe Hooper. That, and the bland MGM DVD cover, which only showed Dennis Hopper standing there with a small chainsaw in a holster while wielding a bigger one, gave me no more of a clue of what to expect from the movie than I already did, which wasn't much. While I had heard some decent things about the third film (two classmates at my high school, who were normally rather stuck up about movies, described both it and the original as awesome flicks), the second seemed to have a more mixed reputation. I did know it was much more comedic and gory than the original, which no doubt explained why opinion on it was so split. For example, while, in his Creature Features book, John Stanley gave it a fairly decent review, along with a three star rating (the same rating he gave the third film), I'd once read Leonard Maltin say that the less said about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, the better. But, always inclined to make up my own mind, I just put all of that aside and popped that DVD in one morning.

After it was over, all I could think to myself was, "Well, that was... interesting." Though everyone was right about how it was much more comedic and overtly gory than the original, what nobody mentioned was just how utterly insane this movie was. Remember back when I was talking about how I'd heard so many stories about the original that I thought it sounded like the epitome of madness on film? I was wrong; this was the epitome of madness on film, especially the latter half in the Sawyers' underground lair, where you had Dennis Hopper running around, sawing into everything he could see, while maniacally screaming, "Bring it all down!", and, "I'll take you back to hell!"; Chop Top constantly acting like the complete loon that he was; him and Drayton almost continuously arguing; Leatherface taking a disturbing, romantic interest in the character of Stretch; and it all culminating in a recreation of the dinner scene, before a chainsaw duel between Hopper and Leatherface, while Chop Top chased Stretch to the top of a fake mountain in the abandoned amusement park. It was so damn crazy that I didn't know how I felt about it after that first viewing. I knew I genuinely liked some parts, but the rampant black humor, lines and instances of acting that were nonsensical, and the sheer insanity of it all put me off so much that I didn't know whether I was coming or going. However, much like the original, the film really grew on me each time I watched it and, while far from perfect, I can now say that I find The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 to be an insane but, overall, very fun and entertaining film.

After escaping from the clutches of the deranged Sawyer family, Sally Hardesty told her macabre story to the authorities, but neither the farmhouse nor the family were ever found. Thirteen years pass, with scattered reports of similar murders across the state of Texas, and then, in 1986, two rowdy high school seniors, Buzz and Rick, are on their way to the Texas-OU football game in Dallas, wreaking havoc along the way, until they end up playing chicken with the wrong pickup truck. After nightfall, the truck reappears and, while it drives alongside them on a bridge, Leatherface pops up in the back and attacks the teens with his chainsaw. Sawing into their car's roof, he kills Buzz, while Rick dies when the car crashes. This "accident" attracts the attention of former Texas Ranger Lieutenant Lefty Enright, Sally and Franklin Hardesty's uncle, who has been tracking the killers all over the state over the state since what happened to his brother's children. A local detective initially dismisses what happened as just an accident, but when Lefty refuses to back down, the authorities put out a newspaper paper article asking for any eyewitnesses to come forward. While Lefty is written off as a crackpot in the article, Stretch, a DJ for a radio station who was on the phone with the teenagers when they were attacked, and recorded it as she does all of the station's call-ins, comes forward with her tape. Initially, he's reluctant to accept her help, but after buying some chainsaws at a hardware store, he visits her at her station and advises her to play the recording over the air, saying it might make the local police take the case a little more seriously. Stretch does play the recording, but unfortunately for her, it attracts the attention of the Sawyers, with Leatherface and Chop Top attacking her at the station. Though she manages to survive this encounter, she eventually finds herself trapped in their nightmarish underground lair beneath an abandoned amusement park. Now, Lefty must not only avenge his niece and nephew but also rescue Stretch, whom Leatherface has become infatuated with. 

L.M. Kit Carson

In the years following The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, both Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel had, amid other proposed projects, come up with various ideas for a sequel, among them a concept called Beyond the Valley of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a much bigger scale film that would've involved an entire town of cannibals. Though that idea wasn't used, as Cannon Films found it too expensive, Henkel has said that elements from his and Hooper's script outlines did end up in the final film of Chainsaw 2, most specifically the Sawyers' underground lair, and he attempted to get Cannon Films to compensate him for that (which I doubt happened, given what slimeballs they're known to have been). The man whom Hooper ultimately brought on to write the sequel was L.M. Kit Carson, whom he'd known long before he even made the first film, since they were both Texas-based filmmakers. According to Carson when he was interviewed for the documentary, It Runs in the Family: The Making of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, they first met at a Chicago airport when Hooper was on his way to the Cannes Film Festival with the first Chainsaw. As Carson was curious about it, Hooper, after returning from Cannes, set up a screening for both him and his friend, future Taxi Driver screenwriter and filmmaker Paul Schrader. According to Carson, the film absolutely blew their minds and freaked them out so much that they had to skip a couple of reels. Carson and Hooper had planned on working together not too long afterward, on a movie that was to have been produced by William Friedkin after he saw and was very impressed by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but that ultimately didn't happen and they went their separate ways until Hooper decided to make Chainsaw 2. Unlike most screenwriters, Carson would be on the set all throughout shooting, as the script had to be constantly rewritten due to budget cuts and changes enforced by Cannon, along with a lot of other interference from them (Carson's final revised draft is dated on June 28th, 1986, and they finished shooting on July 4th). According to him, by the time they were finished, the script looked like a rainbow with all of the different colored, revised pages.

While I wouldn't say he was necessarily past his prime, Tobe Hooper wasn't exactly on Hollywood's A-list of directors at the time of Chainsaw 2, either. While the first film had become a bona fide horror classic, few of the others he made in the interim achieved that same level of success and acclaim, save for maybe Salem's Lot and, of course, Poltergeist. As has been said many times before, the latter should've secured Hooper's place as a heavy-hitter in the industry, but the rumors that Steven Spielberg had actually directed it and was the one responsible for its success did him no favors. There were also a number of projects that Hooper was connected to throughout the years that either fell through or he was removed from, possibly due to the really bad drug problems he developed during this period. And on top of all that, as Kim Henkel notes in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Companion, "Tobe has an ability to involve himself with the worst possible people," which was certainly true of the producers behind Eaten Alive and would prove to be abundantly clear throughout his three-picture deal with Cannon Films, which Chainsaw 2 was part of. While Cannon were quite generous towards him on both Lifeforce and the remake of Invaders from Mars, when Hooper went over-budget on the former and over-schedule on the latter, it would result in them hounding, second-guessing, and interfering with him to no end throughout the sequel's production.

Like John Carpenter and Wes Craven, Hooper really wasn't all that keen on directing a sequel to his most well-known film, and was initially only going to act as a producer on it. But when he couldn't find a director whose work he liked or whom the budget would allow for, he decided to just do it himself. However, he decided that if he was going to do a sequel, he might as well do something other than rehash the original film. Being disappointed that, for years, nobody saw the humor that was in the original, as well as maybe realizing there was no way he could match its tone and feel, which was such a product of its time anyway, he and Carson decided to go for a black comedy approach, along with satire on horror movies, popular movies of the time, and the era's political/social climate. Despite all of the hurdles he had to jump throughout the film's entire production, Hooper did seem to have enjoyed himself while making it and, in later years, appeared at peace with how the final product wasn't entirely the movie he set out to make. One thing's for sure: while it may be the polar opposite of the original, you can still tell just by looking at it that it is a Tobe Hooper film. Also like Carpenter and Craven, as well as George Romero, and even filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, James Cameron, and Steven Spielberg, Hooper had a style that was instantly recognizable and uniquely him, especially at this point, and the fact that he was able to bring that out even when he was suffering from severe studio interference is pretty wonderful.

Like how badly Bryanston screwed over the cast and crew of the original Chainsaw, there are plenty of stories about how badly Cannon Films treated Hooper and the filmmakers on Chainsaw 2, not only keeping it from being an even better film and but also shooting themselves in the foot in terms of the box-office. As I said earlier, the company, notorious for being cheapskates, took $1 million out of the budget, leaving the filmmakers with only around $5 million to work with (the following year, they would ruin any potential that Superman IV: The Quest for Peace had by giving that movie basically nothing to work with). They also forced Hooper and company to make the film within a very short period of time, as they had a set release date for August 22nd of 1986 and shooting didn't even begin until late spring. They were so under the gun, in fact, that they were editing in the middle of shooting. And after filming was completed and the filmmakers had their first studio screening, Cannon decided they didn't like the satirical black comedy (which, as Carson said, was an odd reaction since, if they had read the script, they would've known that's what the movie was going for). According to Carson and others, Cannon then took the film and made even more cuts to it than had already been made by Hooper and his editor, trying to make it more of what they felt it should be rather than what Hooper and company had striven for. While there are deleted scenes available on the home media releases, this other material isn't included, meaning it's either been lost forever or nobody knows where it is now. 

Cannon also hurt themselves when it came to the actual release, in more ways than one. When the ratings board continuously slapped the movie with an "X," Cannon, with the release date looming, decided to just release it unrated. While it is cool that it went out with all of the gore intact, they ended up limiting the amount of advertising possible for it as a result. It's also possible that Cannon, not being happy with the film's comedic nature, may have tried to downplay it in much of the marketing. While there is that Breakfast Club-style poster that you see in the introduction, many of the other posters I've seen, as well as that trailer, make no reference to the comedy, which possibly led to a not so great reception from fans of the original. That, coupled with a possible case of "too little, too late," as it had been twelve years since the original, was the likely reason why the film only made a little over $8 million. It's since become a big cult favorite, thanks to its various home media releases, but, not only did its mediocre box-office performance contribute to Cannon's rapid decline during the last years of the 80's, it and the failure of his other two films for the company were more or less the death knell for Tobe Hooper's career. He would continue making movies throughout the 90's and 2000's, as well as direct a lot of television, but his time as a prestigious, sought after filmmaker was over. He would also not have any more active involvement with the Chainsaw franchise for a long time.

Our ostensible lead is the late Dennis Hopper as Lieutenant Lefty Enright, Sally and Franklin Hardesty's uncle who's spent the last thirteen years hunting down the Sawyers out of revenge. Lefty is a character whom I do find entertaining, as he allows Hopper to go completely nuts during the movie's second half, but I also have mixed feelings about him. On the one hand, his motivation is completely understandable, as is his frustration with how nobody takes him seriously about it, neither the authorities nor the public. When the local detective at the beginning tries to write off the death of the two high school seniors as nothing but an accident, saying they were, "Just a couple of wild punks out raisin' hell," Lefty isn't having it, as he notes, "Yep. One of those boys was so wild, he sawed his own head off going 90 miles per hour." He also doesn't pay him any mind when he goes on about how the weekend of the big Texas-OU game in Dallas always brings out the crazies, and when he then threatens to use his authority to send Lefty back to Amarillo, Lefty calls his bluff, saying, "Well, you just do that, son. I'd like to see that authority." That gets the detective to back off, but when Lefty manages to get his story out, he's written off as a wacko in the newspapers. This doesn't deter him, though, as he arms himself with some chainsaws at a hardware store, intending to fight fire with fire, and then gets Stretch to play her recording of the murder over the airwaves in order to draw out the Sawyers. You can also tell that, over a decade later, he's still haunted by what happened to his niece and nephew, with Hopper's best piece of acting coming when Lefty finds Franklin's corpse in the Sawyers' lair and is truly devastated by it, with his rampage becoming all the more intense. I also kind of wish there was a moment where he talked about visiting Sally, wherever she is at this point, as I'm sure seeing his beloved niece reduced to a shell of a human being, as per the opening crawl, would've added even more emotional juice to his motivation.

Another thing Lefty has going for him is that Hopper manages to bring a real sense of charisma and coolness to the role. In his first scene, when the detective is going on and on about how crazy things get in Dallas this particular time of year, Lefty eventually stops him by coolly saying, "Try to speak plain. Saves time." And when the detective agrees to help get his story out, Lefty simply says, "Brazos," several times in a row. I don't get the significance of that word, which he says elsewhere in the film, including right before the climactic battle (I took

Spanish all throughout high school and even still have the Spanish dictionary that I used back then, but when I looked it up, all I could find was that it was the Spanish word for "arms" or limbs in general), but Hopper manages to sound cool when he does say it. He has a number of other memorable lines throughout the film, such as, "I ain't got no fear left, Lord," "It's the devil's playground!", "Boys, boys, boys," and, along with his maniacal raving, "I'm the Lord of the Harvest." One of my favorite scenes with Lefty is when he goes to the hardware store and loads up on

chainsaws, getting two small ones that he holsters on either side of his waist, and a really big one. He doesn't talk to and barely even acknowledges the manager: he just puts the money down for him and starts grabbing saws, seeing how deftly he can wield them by swinging both of the smaller ones around at the same time, forcing the guy to dodge one of them. Once he's satisfied, he puts his sunglasses back on and walks out with the saws without sawing a word. The manager gives him the chance to test them out on

a log outside and, when Lefty does, he doesn't merely saw into it; he slices at like he's as crazed as the Sawyers (which he later proves to be). And above all else, Lefty looks badass when he's wielding those saws during the climax, and proves to be able to back it up, as he not only gets into a chainsaw duel with Leatherface but actually wins!

Where the mixed feelings come in is from Lefty's treatment on Stretch. When she first visits him at his hotel with her tape of the murders, after he was desperate to get his story out, he's completely dismissive of her. Granted, he's clearly been up all night and is drinking, and also seemingly doesn't want her to get involved because of the danger, but I find it strange how he barely even gives her the time of day. Then later, he visits her radio station and tells her to play that recording over the radio, supposedly so people will take both him and the situation more

seriously but, in reality, he uses her as bait to lure the Sawyers out so he can follow them back to their hideout, which he flat out admits to. This not only leads to L.G. getting killed but also in Stretch ending up in the Sawyer's lair. This doesn't make me lose complete sympathy for Lefty, as after she falls down in there, it prompts him to arm up and charge into the lair to both save her and destroy the family, but it was still a very underhanded thing to do. But even then, up until the climax, he does little more than simply

run around the lair, sawing every support beam he sees while ranting crazily. Though you get why he's doing this, both because of personal vendetta and his being horrified by a wall full of guts he discovers when he first enters the lair, it leads to him not having much purpose until the climax, as we spend most of the second half with Stretch, whom he doesn't help until then. It is offset by how awesome Lefty is during said climax but I always feel like his character kind of petered out by the end.

Chainsaw 2's true star is Caroline Williams as Stretch, DJ for the radio show Red River Rock 'n Roll, which she broadcasts out of Burkburnett. Truth be told, Stretch is one of the best "final girls" you could ever hope for. First off, she's really sexy, with a nice face, short-shorts that show off some awesome legs, and a Texan accent that adds to her charm. Second, you totally buy her as a DJ, with the energy and enthusiasm she puts on when she's answering call-ins, as well as the smooth sense of coolness about her. Third, she doesn't take any crap. Even though she and L.G. can't do anything about it when those annoying seniors call into their show and won't hang up, she does give them a proper earful. And when she goes to meet Lefty at his hotel, and is harassed by some guys who are clearly drunk, she just calls them assholes and goes about her business. Fourth, while she does seem to enjoy her job, it's clear that she'd much rather be a reporter, and sees her recording of the murders as a stepping stone to that career. She also seems like someone who's determined to do the right thing and help catch the killers, as she says the sounds on the tape really got to her and she couldn't just erase it, as per studio regulations. Thus, when Lefty tells her to play the tape on her show, saying it could get him the assistance he needs in finding them, she goes ahead and does it. And despite the terrifying attack she suffers from Leatherface and Chop Top at the radio station, she decides to follow them after they leave, not wanting them to get away. Fourth, during the attack, as freaked out as she is, Stretch does manage to keep something of a cool head, like when she tries to get Chop Top to leave and when she manages to fend off Leatherface with a fire extinguisher, then locks herself behind a large metal door that he can't cut through. When he does manage to get at her, she, after initially panicking, is able to use his childish mindset against him, talking him down and then exploiting his obvious attraction to her. This ultimately manages to make him feel so sexually frustrated that he destroys the room in a rage but leaves her alone. Throughout the second half, Stretch continues trying to use this to her advantage and get him to help her escape, but it doesn't work out that way.

Like Sally in the first movie, Stretch is put through absolute hell once she ends up in the Sawyers' lair. She literally falls down into it, sliding into the remains of some of their past victims; watches as Leatherface skins L.G., is forced to wear his face, and is even tied up while wearing it; has to endure watching L.G., who's badly skinned but still alive, stumble around while trying to get her loose, making her realize too late that she does have feelings for him; tries to find a way out, only to again be chased by Leatherface; is captured by the family; and like

Sally, endures being tied up at the dinner table and bludgeoned by Grandpa. And it's during the second half that Caroline Williams proves she can scream with the best of them, giving Marilyn Burns a real run for her money in that department (heck, I dare say she even rivals Fay Wray!). That said, as much as I like her, there are moments in the movie where, as with Sally, I'm like, "Stop screaming!" But, as I've described, she's not a weak character at all; in fact, she's actually far stronger than Sally. Like Sally, she manages to get herself out of tight spots but, besides

just running away, she not only manages to keep her wits about her, for the most part, but fights back when she's pushed. When Chop Top is chasing her all over the lair during the climax, there are moments where he catches up with her, slashing and beating on her, but she throws punishment back at him, biting both his wrist and ear, almost kicking him off the exterior stairwell, and ultimately slicing into him with a chainsaw all her own and sending him falling to his doom. Like Sally, she's clearly lost her mind by the end, dancing around with the saw similar to Leatherface at the end of the first (but since she briefly appears in the next one, as we'll get into, maybe it was just temporary insanity caused by all that had happened).

Another character I really like is the late Lou Perryman (who was hideously murdered in 2009) as Stretch's co-worker, L.G. Perryman was just one of those guys who, while maybe not the handsomest person ever, could conceivably sweep a woman off her feet because of his natural, almost cowboy-like charisma and he brought that to the role of L.G. in spades. The guy is totally smitten with Stretch, constantly calling her "darlin'" and trying to get her attention, like building her a little house out of french fries (with the time and amount of fries and ketchup that had to have taken, that's some dedication), but much to his chagrin, she makes it clear that he's just a friend to her. Regardless, he has some truly memorable moments, lines, and tics about. For one, he's constantly spitting, even while inside the radio station, and while I normally can't stand that stuff because I think it's just plain gross, he does it so much, even while being bludgeoned by Chop Top and after having been skinned alive, that it becomes endearing. I also like some of the stuff that he has in his section of the station's studio, chief among them this sticker on the glass that says, "DAMN, I'M GOOD." When they're at the hotel, and Stretch, irritated at how Lefty blew her off, sits down beside L.G. and grumbles, "Hardass," L.G. responds, "Hardass?! Me?! Well, maybe a semi hardass, but I got a soft heart." And one moment that caught me completely off-guard the first time and still makes me smile is when he gets out of his truck at the radio station and suddenly sings, "Words inside your haunted head!" I just remember laughing out loud and thinking, "What was that?!"

Even though Stretch waves off L.G.'s affections several times, to the point where he gets kind of jealous when she sticks around the radio station, waiting for Lefty, while he goes out for coffee, this doesn't deter him from coming back to the station with some for her. Unfortunately, this leads to him getting badly bludgeoned by Chop Top and skinned by Leatherface. Amazingly, he doesn't die right away after this, as he regains consciousness and cuts Stretch loose, despite the excruciating pain he has to be in, but he does eventually succumb to his injuries, which

is when she realizes that he was more than a friend to her, saying out loud that she loves him. It's made even sadder when he says, "I guess I'm fallin' apart on you, honey," right before he collapses and moans a pained, anguished, "No," while reaching out to her before he finally does die (though, you gotta love how his last words are, "Ah, shit," in an annoyed tone). But unfortunately, this is all especially hard to look back on now, not only because Perryman was murdered but that he was killed with an axe, no less.

Hooper clearly realized that Leatherface was the character from the original film that resonated the most, as he first appears here less than ten minutes in to attacks the two obnoxious high school seniors while they're on the phone with Stretch. However, his portrayal is one of the most contentious things about this film, as he's no longer the terrifying, screaming, enormous man-child who would bludgeon or slice to pieces anything that moved. Instead, he not only directly kills just one person, Buzz (although, you could also say that he did cause the car crash that killed Rick, and his skinning L.G. alive led to his death), but a major part of his character is that he becomes infatuated with Stretch, which truly makes him feel nothing like the character that Gunnar Hansen played in the original. As for me, I do indeed have some mixed feelings about Leatherface's portrayal in this film, but I don't mind that they tried to make him a bit more of an actual character. Now, do I prefer the screaming killing machine from the first movie? Absolutely, and that's part of the downside to this portrayal, as I'll get into, but I find the scenes between him and Stretch to be kind of interesting. They have a very odd Beauty and the Beast feel to them, with Leatherface initially trying to attack her but then, when she talks him down, he becomes curious and then lustful, and you can often sense how torn he is between his family's orders to kill her and these feelings. There are some very clear sexual overtones regarding the saw in their first scene, and when he can't figure out what to do or how to satisfy his needs with Stretch, he flies into a rage, destroying everything around him, and later deceives Chop Top into thinking he did kill her. He's all the more conflicted later on when he finds Stretch inside the family's lair. Once again, he almost kills her, but Stretch talks him down and he experiences lustful emotions again. This leads into a surreal moment where he puts L.G.'s skinned face onto hers, along with his cowboy hat, and then dances with her for a little bit. Like the Grandpa clubbing scene in the original, this is both sick and yet funny in a demented way too. But when they run into each other again, he chases her with the saw, like he's going to kill her, and, again, doesn't know what to do when he catches up to her and she starts talking with him (starting to see a pattern here?).

My favorite moment with Leatherface is when Drayton and Chop Top come across Stretch after he's cornered her and Drayton, upon learning who she is, says to Chop Top, "You told me you boys got her!" As Chop Top confirms as much, it then cuts to Leatherface, who has this hilarious, "Oh, shit," expression. Once everything is revealed, Drayton basically gives him his version of a sex talk, which amounts to it being something he shouldn't get mixed up in. Stretch starts begging for him to help her, while Drayton tells him to finish her off, and Leatherface

just shakes his head, refusing to do it, for which he gets reprimanded. Drayton takes the saw away from him and growls, "Turned traitor for a piece of tail... Wait till Grandad hears about this," leading him to bang his head against a little birdcage in frustration. Even at the dinner table, he's trying to comfort Stretch while she's screaming like mad, unable to do anything to stop his family from killing her (he apparently decides to take the initiative and kiss her while he still can). Despite his hesitancy, he has no choice but to

untie Stretch and hold her over the tub, as his family, like with Sally, tries to get Grandpa to bludgeon her. And then, he has to face off with Lefty when he bursts in, getting a chainsaw rammed all the way through him and apparently being blown to smithereens by a hand grenade.

I've heard some say that they feel the filmmakers made Leatherface into a pussy here but, if you think about it, he was kind of a pussy when he was around his family in the original, with how he cowered in fear from Drayton, and he still takes plenty of abuse from him here. But, save for when he's smitten with Stretch, he's still chasing people with his chainsaw, tearing up cars and a radio station, and even though, again, he really kills only one person, it is a brutal kill, regardless. And I don't think a pussy would get into a chainsaw duel with Lefty, take a chainsaw

through the gut and out the back, and still keep going. (If you want to see Leatherface turned into a pussy, wait until we get to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. Seriously, this Leatherface can beat the hell out of that... thing, which I don't refer to as Leatherface if I can help it). Rather, what I have a problem with here is that this Leatherface just isn't scary or disturbing like the original. For one, I don't think he looks scary, as I'm not a fan of the mask that Tom Savini and his crew came up with. Savini has said he wanted the mask to look like it was made out 

of several different faces but to me, it just looks like a Leatherface Halloween mask, coming off like latex rather stretched, dried human skin, and the hair is way too overdone, almost looking an Afro. And his outfit is, well... initially, it's like a snazzier, cleaner version of the suit he wore at the end of the first movie, with the black jacket, white shirt and black tie underneath, black dress pants, and black gloves. When we him in the underground lair, he's back to wearing the butcher's apron that he wore throughout most of the

original, albeit with a different shirt underneath, but it's not as unsettling. Even the chainsaw isn't as scary, as it looks fancier and cleaner than the one in the original, which looked cheaper and had a lot of wear and tear to it. Performance-wise, Leatherface's vocalizations are nowhere near as frightening as those he made before, as it's just typical yelling. That said, the way he sings in a mumbled manner to himself while butchering L.G. is both kind of funny and disturbing. The idea from the original that he has a

number of masks and switches personalities and functions with each one is dropped and would never return, save for its embarrassing use in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation and being hinted at in Texas Chainsaw 3-D. And physicality-wise, while Leatherface is played by some large men again, he doesn't come off as intimidating. Plus, he often does this weird sort of dance where he rocks back and forth in place while holding his chainsaw above his head. In fact, just about every time he has the chainsaw, he does that dance at least once and it comes off as just silly.

Bill Johnson is the man credited with playing Leatherface but, unlike with the first film, he's one of several people who play the role. Since the other two are stuntmen, Johnson is onscreen in the scenes where Leatherface is required to show some emotion, like when he's interacting with Stretch and the other family members, especially in the really tight close-ups. Thus, if you know what Johnson's face looks like from interviews, you can tell in those close-ups that it's him. Also, his mask appears to be different from the ones that the stuntmen wear, as those don't have as

much detail. Speaking of the stuntmen, Tom Morga, in-between playing Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th Part V and Michael Myers in some of Halloween 4, was able to add Leatherface to his list of horror roles, playing him during the attack on Rick and Buzz during the opening. After that, during many of the scenes when he's running around with the chainsaw and battles Lefty during the climax, he's played by another stuntman, Bob Elmore.

Despite attempts to get Gunnar Hansen, as well as possibly Edwin Neal and John Dugan, back, Jim Siedow ended up being the only actor from the original to reprise his role. Here, the Old Man, whose name is revealed to be Drayton Sawyer, has moved up from running a decrepit old gas station in the middle of nowhere to running a sort of meals-on-wheels food van in Dallas and has become a local celebrity due to his chili, for which he wins an annual cook-off two years in a row. His basic personality is the same as it was originally: when in public, he puts on the face of a kindly old man who just loves making and serving some good meat products, but in private, he's a loud, angry, abusive bully who often berates and beats on Leatherface and Chop Top, and constantly complains about how hard it is to run a small business, with lines like, "The small businessman always, always, always gets it in the ass," "I wouldn't wish this rotten life on a one-eyed ferret with mange," and, "A man builds a good sturdy trade by hookin' and crookin' and then, ka-blooey! The gods just kick him right in the balls." In fact, he thinks every intruder in their lair is affiliated with some sort of rival, including both Stretch and Lefty. When faced with the latter before the climax, he says, "Who sentcha? Those sissies over at Delmar catering? That chicken-shit burrito man bunch? Well, I don't care, you hear? Yeah, that's right. It's a dog eat dog world, and from where I sit, there just ain't enough damn dogs! If you can't stand the heat, get out of the damn kitchen!" Best of all is when, after Drayton tries to buy him off, Lefty proclaims, "I'm the Lord of the Harvest," and his response is, "Who's that? Some new health food bunch?" And then, after seeing the state that Stretch is in, Lefty starts up his chainsaw, rushes at the family, and saws Drayton right in the hemorrhoids! He quickly crawls underneath the table for cover, goes in circles while on all fours, and says out loud how he badly he got his "hems," then adds, "Saved a trip to the hospital... Sure burned my beans bad on that one."

Drayton is much more sadistic here than he was originally. While in the first movie, he was actually torn about taking part in his family's grisly crimes, saying he couldn't take any pleasure in it, he's now willing to kill anybody and use their meat to sell as barbecue to the unsuspecting locals, particularly with a big football game drawing a number of potential customers to the area. When Leatherface is reluctant to kill Stretch as Drayton orders, Drayton decides to put Stretch through the same torturous dinner experience that they put Sally through, and this time,

when Grandpa is too weak to kill his intended victim, Drayton gets impatient and whacks Stretch on the head himself. He's even willing to blow himself and his family sky-high when everything begins to go south, pulling the pen on a grenade that he calls a, "Fuck you, Charlie." All that said, despite his ongoing verbal and physical abuse, there are moments where he does try to act like an older brother to the other two, particularly Leatherface when he tries to talk him out of his desire for Stretch, telling him that sex 

is nothing but a scam, and even tells her to leave Leatherface alone when she's pleading with him for help, feeling it's confusing him. And at the dinner table, Drayton says, "I stoop my shoulders taking care of my younger brothers. It squashed the young years out of my life... like a can of cheese whip." That makes him somewhat akin to an abusive parent who thinks they're doing the right thing but don't comprehend that they're actually doing more harm than good. Case in point how, when Leatherface can't bring himself to kill Stretch, Drayton angrily takes his chainsaw away and growls his disgust. In that moment, Drayton sums up both his and family's philosophy when he tells Leatherface, "You have one choice, boy: sex or the saw. Sex is, well, nobody knows, but the saw, the saw is family."

Leatherface may be the franchise's icon but, as far as this specific movie goes, the one who steals the show is Bill Moseley as Chop Top. Even those who don't like the movie typically like him, and it's not hard to see why, as Moseley does such an amazing job of creating a really demented and yet funny character. The first time I saw the movie, I thought Chop Top was meant to be the Hitchhiker from the original, with the metal plate in his head the result of an operation to save his life after he got run over. It wasn't until I read up on the movie and the franchise

that I learned he's the Hitchhiker's twin brother who, according to Tobe Hooper, was in Vietnam during the events of the first movie, which is where he got the plate, but Moseley did such a good job of emulating Edwin Neal's speech patterns and tics that I wouldn't be surprised if others initially thought he was meant to be the same character. In any case, his first scene at the radio station is very memorable and actually quite creepy with the set-up of Stretch being all alone with this weirdo. He immediately makes an impression, not just with his appearance but also his strange speech patterns and voice, schizophrenic way of thinking and bringing things up, and his habit of heating the tip of a coat hanger with a lighter and seemingly scratching his head with it, though you soon learn he's actually scratching his metal plate, while also eating the little bits of dead flesh that come off. Just like, or perhaps even more so than, his brother, Chop Top is very a sadistic individual, taking real pleasure out of physically and mentally torturing people. He beats the living crap out of L.G. with a hammer, mocking him while doing it; is constantly running around and laughing while he and his family are doing the most hideous things; and the last ten minutes or so of the movie involve him relentlessly chasing and slashing at Stretch as she tries to find a way out of the lair, all the while laughing like the maniac he is. Also like his brother, he has a knack for mutilating himself, as he cuts across his neck and seems to enjoy it, as he smiles without even flinching.

As sadistic and twisted as he is, Chop Top is really funny, with so many memorable lines, like, "Lick my plate, you dog dick!", "Peel that pig and slice him thick!", and "Dog will hunt! Get that bitch, Leatherface! Get that bitch! Dog will hunt!" The moment with him that cracks me up the most is when Leatherface first appears at the radio station and accidentally hits Chop Top in the side of the head with the chainsaw while going for Stretch. Getting knocked to the floor, Chop Top yells, "Not me, dumbass! Her! Get the girl!" and later, while

Leatherface is trying to get at Stretch, Chop Top is yelling, "Ow, ow, ow, ow, he dented my plate! Oh, my brain is burning! Nam flashback! Nam flashback!", while repeatedly smacking at his smoking plate. He then looks down at his destroyed wig and yells, "Leatherface, you bitch hog! Look what you did to my Sonny Bonno wig-do! Oh, goddamn, I can't believe it! You're gonna have to buy me a new plate cover! You're gonna have to me a new plate cover, Leatherface! Ohh!" (This is only one of two moments

where he shows an emotion other than sadistic glee.) Another part that gets me is when, after trying to kill Stretch at the dinner table, they can hear Lefty singing nearby and Chop Top actually starts singing along with him: "Bringing in the sheaves! Bringing in the sheaves! We will come rejoicing!" He's also obsessed with opening his own theme park, which he intends to call Nam Land, and spends one scene babbling on about it, even grabbing a fire extinguisher, spraying it, and yelling, "Nam Land!" I could go on all day talking about the funny stuff that Chop Top says and does, but we have to move on.

Besides his portrayal and craziness, Chop Top is also memorable because of his striking look, with the pale skin, dark glasses, ugly teeth, Sonny Bonno wig, and hippy-style clothing, with various button all over the vest he wears. And that's just when you first see him, as after Leatherface messes up his wig, you often get a good look at the enormous hole in the right side of his head, with the metal plate underneath, and the strands of hair here and there well below the cranium, and it's a really impressive makeup. And technically, his brother, whose real name we learn was Nubbins,

is here too, as Chop Top often carries around his long decomposed corpse, using him as a type of puppet. In fact, except for Grandpa, every member of the family makes use of the corpse at one point or another, with Leatherface tying it to his front when he attacks Buzz and Rick at the beginning.

One character whose portrayal here is, in my opinion, improved upon the original is Grandpa (Ken Evert). While his makeup was impressive, John Dugan really did nothing except sit around and come off like a corpse; Evert, on the other hand, actually gives Grandpa a bit of a personality. Not only does he actually move and seem somewhat cognizant of what's going on around him, as well as make low groaning sounds, but he gives a creepy smile when Stretch is presented to him at the dinner table, licks the ladle he's given, and gets into trying to kill her, a crazed look growing across his face as it goes on. He even starts to laugh, and when he tastes some of her blood, he drools over it and seems to want more. While there's still a bit of that same humor from the original, with Drayton going on about how great Grandpa was as a butcher but now he can't really do much, Grandpa kind of makes up for lost time here. Even though he can still barely hold onto the mallet, he actually reaches for it himself when he drops it at one point and does manage to hit Stretch pretty hard, before Drayton gets impatient and clubs her himself. Moreover, when Leatherface and Lefty are having their chainsaw duel, Grandpa actually stands up and gives us a hint of how skilled he used to be when he flings the mallet through the air like a tomahawk! Unfortunately, he clobbers Leatherface right in the head and then proceeds to keel over from the exertion. We also learn a little more from Drayton about Grandpa's old job at the slaughterhouse, such as how he was thrown a barbecue every spring in celebration of his butchering skills, as well as about the automation of the slaughterhouse, but we're now told that, rather than being driven out of work by the new ways, as the Hitchhiker suggested, the family quit working at the slaughterhouse because Grandpa, disgusted with the automation, couldn't take the "shame" of it anymore and just stopped going in. That makes me wonder how long ago that was now, since Grandpa is supposed to be over 130 years old by this point (but, then again, this is Drayton saying all of this, so who knows how much of it is true and how much a creation of his warped mind). 

I also think that Grandpa's makeup is better than the original. In fact, Tom Savini has said that his design for Grandpa is the piece of work in his career that he's the most proud of and I'm not inclined to disagree with him. While the original Grandpa was still really good for the tiny budget they had and considering it was the work of a plastic surgeon rather than an actual makeup artist (as I said in that review, that may have led to it feeling more real), this just looks better. Not only did Ken Evert's thinness sell that this is a frail old man. but because the camera gets right in on

his face at one point, we see a lot more detail than we did before, like those sunken in eyes, sores around the mouth, nasty-looking teeth, and a very realistic, wrinkly texture to the skin. And, finally, while we're on the subject of Grandpa, let's mention the corpse of the family's Great Grandma, which is kept up in a place in this stone tower looming over the amusement park called "Chainsaw Heaven," which we see in the final scene. First, how is she better preserved than the skeletal Grandma seen in the house in the first film

(and, for that matter, where was she in that film)? And is she actually alive before Stretch tears the chainsaw out of her arms? Her head seems to move a little bit by itself to seemingly look at Stretch afterward, and Chop Top even tells Stretch, "You killed her, you hog bitch!" Granted, he could mean that he killed her by tearing her arms off in order to get the chainsaw (not to mention that it's Chop Top we're talking about here) but it's one of those bizarre moments in this movie that makes you wonder.

Some other noteworthy characters in the film are the very first ones we see: Buzz (Barry Kinyon) and Rick "the Prick" (Chris Douridas), the two rowdy high school seniors who wreak havoc on the road while on their way to the football game and, more specifically, the after party. Even for a couple of guys who are intoxicated, the stuff they do is far beyond crossing the line. Rick has a freaking Magnum that he uses to shoot at mailboxes and road signs, they play chicken with an oncoming truck, eventually forcing it into the ditch (which leads to their demise), and they call in on

Stretch's radio show, harass her, and tie up the line, refusing to hang up. Also, Rick has this really annoying, "Heh, heh, heh, heh!" laugh, and wears these obnoxious glasses with eyes painted on the lenses, while Buzz just comes off as a really stuck-up rich kid, often yelling, "Hook 'em horns, baby!" In short, they're quintessential slasher movie victims who deserve everything they have coming to them. Another one worth mentioning, despite being in only one scene, is the guy (James N. Harrell) who owns Cut-Rite, the hardware store where Lefty buys his chainsaws. The reason for that is a strange line he says while, rather excitedly, watching Lefty test out the large chainsaw on the log outside of the store. He either says, "Oh, my kid banana," or, "Oh, my aching banana." If he said the latter, then I don't want to know any more, but if it was the former, as the closed captions on the old MGM DVD seemed to think, then what in the hell does that mean?! Seriously, what was that?! I'm not going to dwell on it but, when I hear stuff like this in his movies, all I can say is, "Tobe Hooper, you were weird!"

Even though the film begins with another opening crawl (as would the next two movies), recapping the events of the first film and the aftermath, it immediately establishes a completely different visual aesthetic. For one, we've gone from the original's grimy, 16mm look to that of a traditional, and somewhat glossy, movie, and this time, there's no indication that it's extremely hot (although I know it was from the It Runs in the Family documentary that it actually was, especially in the set for the Sawyers'

underground lair), and during the daytime scenes on the roadways, at the hotel, the hardware store, and the radio station, it looks fairly normal. But during the nighttime scene where Buzz and Rick are killed, it comes off as much more heightened and exaggerated, with deeper and brighter shades of blue lighting illuminating the bridge and coming through the car's windows, and the vehicles' headlights coming off as much harsher. Later on, this aesthetic becomes the norm as the film goes on, with it actually shifting

within a single scene. During the scene at the the radio station where Stretch first meets Chop Top and Leatherface, it's initially lit in a naturalistic way, but when Chop Top makes his first appearance, the lighting becomes much more surreal and sinister, with red and green colors thanks to all of the unusual lights and lamps in that room, and deeper, contrasting shadows as a result of no overhead light. And after Stretch follows them to their underground lair, we enter the madness that is their world for the rest of the film, not just in the crazed, surreal art direction but

also with how it's full of smoke, giving it a constantly hazy appearance, with shafts of light coming through the smokehouse doors, and random instances of blue, green, and yellow lighting. And when Stretch manages to climb out of the lair during the climax, the cinematography still comes off as warped and often tilted, as she tries to climb up the stairwell to escape Chop Top and is ultimately left just as crazy as the family during the final scene.

Like the first film, Chainsaw 2, despite being a Hollywood production, was shot entirely in and around Austin, mostly because, according to cinematographer Richard Kooris, Tobe Hooper wanted to try to have the same control he had on the first one. Though the film's main location highlight was the Sawyers' underground lair, they also managed to make use of some other noteworthy locations, like the lovely countryside in the opening, the menacing bridge where Rick and Buzz run afoul of Leatherface,

and the Cut-Rite hardware store (an actual business whose manager was James Harrell, who appears in the film), which looks pretty innocuous on the outside, like a typical rural business, but when Lefty goes into the backroom to load up, it's filled with every sort of chainsaw you could hope for. It even has a tree stump on the floor, for some reason, and outside in the yard, there's a log where people can test out the saws that they buy because, as the manager tells Lefty, they're already gassed up (a very stupid and

unsafe idea). The K-OKLA radio station looks like it's seen better days on the outside (as a half-torn sign on its side suggests, it's been repurposed from something else) and when we first see its interior, when Stretch and L.G. are working in the actual studio, it has a very lived-in quality, with all the personal touches to the space, along with the equipment. But in the lead-up to where Stretch gets attacked, it's revealed that the hallways are rather narrow and claustrophobic, and next to the studio is a sort of large storeroom behind a big, sliding metal

door, filled with lots of cardboard boxes, beer cans, and a big ice tub, as well as a clock on the wall with a red, neon rim, which is where Stretch takes cover from Leatherface, only to find herself trapped. Downstairs is a sort of lounge area where she first meets Chop Top, as well as a record vault, where Leatherface comes charging out at her.

The interiors of the radio station were done at the same location they used for much of the underground lair, which was actually the former home of the Austin American-Statesman newspaper, an abandoned printing plant that was, by all accounts, a massive place, helping to make the movie look much bigger in scale than it actually was. The main hub is a surreal madhouse: an enormous, multi-layered chamber filled with big pipes that a person can walk and crawl through, hundreds of hanging lights,

including a lot of Christmas ones, and small chandeliers, a space underneath a low ceiling where they cook the meat, a smokehouse where Leatherface does his butchering, with chunks of human meat hanging from hooks on the ceiling, and the spot with the dinner table, which is far more disgusting here than it was in the original, with bones, plates, and filth strewn everywhere, and Nubbins' corpse sitting in one of the chairs. There's even a rat that sticks its head up out of a bowl atop the trophy that Drayton

won for his chili (the idea that there was actual chili in the bowl earlier makes it even more disgusting to think about). That leads me to another thing: besides the way it looks, the place just feels uncomfortable, with how filthy everything is, all the smoke and dust in the air, and the bones that proliferate the place, including within the earth walls. Of course, they also still make furniture out of bones, including a bizarre altar, topped with a cow skull, behind the dinner table, and keep souvenirs from their victims, as well as whole corpses, as we see when Lefty finds Franklin's

corpse. And while there wasn't a feeling of extreme heat in the movie beforehand, I think that you get that sense here. Like the original, they filmed in Texas during the summer, especially May, June, and early July, and I've heard that it was like 120 degrees inside that printing plant, which you can feel, and with all of the dust and smoke in the air and such, it looks like you could choke in there.

Outside of the main chamber, it's just a maze of tunnels, filled with either pieces of the family's macabre handiwork or the remains of their victims, including a wall that Lefty finds packed with guts when he first enters. The most interesting spot is this really long tunnel that's filled to the brim with old lights, lamps, all sorts of furniture, both natural and made from bones, and lots of skeletons, including some that are sitting on beach chairs. Like the main chamber, you get the feeling that there are various

levels to the place in general, with Stretch falling quite a long way down before hitting the slide in a chamber with a bunch of bones at the bottom, before she falls through the floor and lands in the heart of the lair, in the smokehouse. The family not only created their own world beneath the amusement park but they expanded it to up top as well, as they turned a room near the top of the place's highest structure into Chainsaw Heaven where Great Grandma is kept: a large room with lights strung around everywhere and more bone furniture, including a tiny carousel-like

object with skulls and hand-bones hanging from it. Heck, the reason why the amusement park probably attracted the family in and of itself is because the entrance to it looks like you're driving through the skeleton of a giant monster, with a pit in the ground there that literally opens up into hell.

Besides the dark humor, hyper-realistic look, and over-the-top characters, the movie's tone is often just downright bizarre and as insane as the Sawyers themselves. You can definitely say the same about the original, in addition to its being nightmarish, but Chainsaw 2 takes it to a whole other level and is a prime example of the surreal nature of Hooper's overall filmography that author John Kenneth Muir talks about in his book, Eaten Alive at a Chainsaw Massacre: The Films of Tobe Hooper. Following the

opening credits, which are traditional enough, save for Hooper and Jerry Lambert's bizarre, carnival-like score, we've got these two guys driving along country roads, with one of them shooting at every sign, mailbox, and other roadside object he sees, while wearing weird glasses and laughing maniacally. When they later run afoul of the Sawyers, them being attacked by Leatherface as he stands in the back of a pickup truck is already pretty crazy, but when he first pops up, he has the corpse that's later revealed to be 

that of Nubbins tied to him, for no reason other than to make it weirder. While things don't get quite that crazy again until the major scene at the radio station, there's still this weirdness that hovers over a number of scenes that should be normal, like when Stretch visits Lefty at his hotel, which is filled with a bunch of drunk morons in town for the football game (Hooper himself makes a cameo here), including two guys dressed in traditional cowboy garb who head straight for Stretch, and Lefty himself has clearly had a less than peaceful night, while also showing for the

first time just how disturbed he is. After that, we have the sight of Drayton, whom anyone who's seen the first film will recognize, winning that chili competition and collecting a trophy with a bowl atop it that is overrun with actual chili, followed by that rather awkward scene with Lefty at the hardware store and the manager's strangely delighted reaction to his chainsaw testing, and, a few minutes later, Drayton driving his food wagon home will singing, "Number One! The Sawyers are Number One!" Coupled with the unusual non-sequiturs we have here

and there, like Lefty's "Brazos!" line, the detective at the crime scene randomly saying, "Remember the Alamo, cowboy," to himself, and the Cut-Rite manager's "banana" line, you have a movie that's already strange about half an hour in but, once Chop Top and Leatherface show up at the radio station, all semblance of reality goes totally out the window.

Since he decided that, in keeping with the tone, as well as because audiences would probably be expecting it, this film, unlike the original, would be a full-on, crazy gorefest, Hooper decided to go with the best and hire Tom Savini for the effects. By this point, Savini's reign as the master of splatter was slowly winding down, as the movies that really showed off his talents, like Dawn of the Dead, Friday the 13th, and Day of the Dead, were now behind him, and this would be one of the last films where he really got to

strut his stuff. For my money, most of the effects are really good, but there are others that are a little suspect. A great one is the opening kill, where Leatherface cuts Buzz's head open and you see the entire right side of his head slowly coming loose until it's likely hanging off by just a small piece of skin, with blood pouring out while he convulses. Unfortunately, the reverse shot of it looks a little silly, with the blood just spraying up through a hollowed out head, which you can tell is that of a dummy

(Savini himself has said he's not happy with that shot). One effect that especially makes me squirm is when Chop Top bludgeons L.G. with the hammer. It's not just the gore itself but the chaotic action, the editing, Bill Moseley coming down crazily with the hammer, and L.G. yelling in pain, as well as convulsing in a manner similar to Kirk in the original, that give it a very visceral feeling. Even more horrific is when L.G. is skinned alive, which is probably the most genuinely disturbing scene in the movie (Hooper would later say it and the other effects may have

worked a little too well and offset the intended humor). The sight of him standing there in just his boxers, with big chunks of his legs and torso flayed off, along with his face, really makes you go, "Aah!", because it's so realistic-looking. He does kind of bring to mind Frank in Hellraiser, with the exposed ribs and chunks of muscle on his chest, as well as the musculature in his face, which is especially excruciating to look at for me. And the way he yells when he first regains consciousness also makes you wince, as you think of the pain he must be in. What

I'm not so sure about, though, is his skinned off face. Not that it isn't realistic in how it looks, because it is; it really looks like a freshly flayed off face, with the moist texture and the blood, and it's especially disturbing when Leatherface makes Stretch wear it. But it doesn't quite look like L.G.'s face to me, and when Stretch puts the face back on him after he dies, it doesn't feel like it matches. It just looks as if she put a mask over his skinned face instead of actually putting his own face back on. I know I'm probably not sounding fair and coming off like a nitpicker, but that's how I've always felt ever since I first saw the film.

When Lefty kicks open the wall when he first enters the park, the guts that fall out were real and from a slaughterhouse. And as is often the case when that happens, they apparently stank to high heaven. I also think that Franklin's skeleton is designed really well, with a horrific detail that suggests Leatherface sawed up through both his torso and head, and the same goes for Nubbins' corpse. The effect that I'm the least keen on, though, is when Leatherface takes a chainsaw all the way through him during his duel with Lefty,

mainly because of how the fake stomach looks. It's huge, even for Leatherface! It looks as if his belly suddenly bloated up when he got the chainsaw shoved into him. Granted, the shot of the chainsaw apparently stuck all the way through him with the blade still running is cool but that stomach doesn't look right to me. Like the reverse shot of the first kill, it looks silly and not in a good way. One final bit of bloodletting I want to mention is during the final scuffle between Stretch and Chop Top. I've said in

past reviews that it's often the little subtle things that make me cringe and that's definitely true of the slashes that Chop Top gives Stretch with his razor, particularly when he gets her in the legs, as well as when he slightly cuts his own neck. And the nasty slashes that she gives him across the torso with the chainsaw look fine but the shots of them are so quick that it feels cut down.

Needless to say, not only is the gore more overt but the notion of human butchery and cannibalism, strongly hinted at in the first film but never pushed totally front and center, is much more in your face here. It's not so grisly that you see the Sawyers chowing down on obviously human chunks of barbecue meat, nor do you see their unwary customers doing so, save for a brief but really icky moment with the woman who presents Drayton with the chili cookoff trophy, but it's much more obvious, 

like when Chop Top, after bludgeoning L.G., pats his torso and comments, "Look at that beef!", and when we see Leatherface skinning him in the smokehouse, below the chunks of obvious human meat hanging above, with Chop Top commenting, "Peel that pig and slice him thick!", while Drayton tells him to get those "hogs" on the grill. Also, Drayton refers to L.G.'s skinned face as an "eyeball pate," (which, "Ugh,"), and goes on about the "croissant sandwiches" they're going to make for the pre-game brunch the next day.

Not surprisingly, there's some black humor in all of this. Besides what I've already mentioned, there's a moment where Drayton becomes unhappy when, thanks to Leatherface's ineptitude, or possibly Lefty's ongoing sabotage a few levels above them, their lair's main support beam is unstable and dirt and dust tumble down, spoiling the meat that they're cooking. He gets bent out of shape and yells, "Dirty meat don't cut it! Family standards only require the best meat in town! More money lost. I never, never, never get a break!" It also leads into one of the movie's main subjects for satire.

Like the first film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 took influence from the time period in which it was made, but whereas the original subtly and naturally wove its commentary into the fabric of its story (the oil crisis, the counter-culture movement, etc.), this one completely satirizes and turns them on their heads. As L.M. Kit Carson said, if the victims in the original film were hippies, the logical next step for the 80's sequel would be for the family to prey on yuppies. To that end, he and Hooper make the first

two victims yuppies in the most unlikable of ways. As I've already gone into, Buzz and Rick are two complete assholes who have no regard whatsoever for other people's feelings, property, or even safety, for that matter, and so, although Leatherface slicing Buzz's head open with a chainsaw is rather extreme, the two of them still deserve whatever punishment they get. Furthermore, Drayton has, unbeknownst to them, turned the Dallas yuppies into cannibals by making chili and barbecue out of human victims and 

then selling it to them, making a particularly big profit whenever there's a big sports event in town, such as the Texas-OU football game. In fact, he's one himself whenever he goes out in public, as he wears nice clothes and puts on an affable facade, when he's actually completely ruthless and does whatever it takes to "make a killing," both literally and figuratively. In a moment when he says he loves Dallas because, "This town loves prime meat!", everyone cheers, making for a sick but funny way of commenting on how the rich devour the common man

by buying up everything with their credit cards and killing small businesses with corporations, and only care about furthering their own livelihoods without thinking about what they're doing to those lower on the social and economic ladder. Not only are they now literally devouring other people but, more than likely, they're eating each other as well. Drayton even wins an award for his chili, and there's a grossly funny moment when the woman who presents him with it tastes some of the chili and pulls a bone or something out of her mouth, to which Drayton comments, "Whoop, whoop! Heh, one of thus, uh, hard-shell peppercorns."

The film also targets other movies that were extremely popular around that time, most notably the teen-oriented movies, such as those made by John Hughes. Buzz and Rick the Prick not only fall into this bit of satire as well, since they're the only two teenage characters in the entire film and are the most unlikable, but the filmmakers also create a romance, albeit a one-sided one, between Stretch and Leatherface. And unlike the romances in a lot of those teen movies, this one is doomed to fail and Stretch

even tells Leatherface as much (it also reminds me of that part in the 1976 King Kong when Dwan tells Kong, "Forget about me. This whole thing is just never gonna work. Can't you see?"). And, of course, the film's most popular poster copies The Breakfast Club's exactly, right down to how the Sawyers are posed. The film also directly parodies E.T. in the scene where Stretch gives Chop Top a quick "tour" of the radio station, just like how Elliot gave E.T. a tour of his room (she even uses Mr. Shark!). It not only

works straight up because, let's face it, Chop Top looks like an alien, but it's a funny in-verse in that she's doing it out of abject fear and in an attempt to get him out of the studio as fast as possible. And then, Chop Top says how much he loved the recording of him and Leatherface murdering Buzz and Rick, reenacting it with his voice and then asking, "What was that anyway, the Rambo III soundtrack?" Since Rambo: First Blood Part II had been an enormous hit the previous year, you could take this a comment on how people were really digging

extremely violent movies around this time (in a movie that itself is extremely violent). And speaking of Rambo, John Kenneth Muir suggests in his section on Chainsaw 2 in Eaten Alive at a Chainsaw Massacre that Chop Top's idea for "Nam Land," which he describes as, "What the public wants!", is indicative of how, at the time, there was a resurgence in interest in the Vietnam War, with movies like Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and Hamburger Hill. Moreover, he notes how people were, weirdly, affectionate for the war, calling it "toothless nostalgic fodder" that Chop Top, himself a warped veteran, planns to cash in on in his own business venture.

Hooper seemed to have been intent on making something that's often been viewed as subtext in slasher movies totally literal here. There's been a long-standing idea that the killers in these movies are sexually repressed and frustrated and, therefore, the long bladed weapons they use are viewed as phallic symbols, substitutes for their impotent private parts, which they then plunge into women. For me, I feel that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar; just because something is long and pointed doesn't automatically

mean it's supposed to be a penis. If the killers plunge their knives and other bladed weapons into women as a substitute for sex, then what about all the men that get killed in these movies too? Does that mean the killers are subconsciously gay as well? Some would argue that it's to get back at the men who can have the sexual experiences which they can't, but they're still plunging the supposed phallic symbols into both men and women. And let's not forget that, in the original Friday the 13th, the film that inspired many of these movies, the killer was a woman using bladed weapons

against both men and women. I know somebody will find a way to make something Freudian out of that, and I'll admit that I have seen some slasher movies where there was some sexual repression and misogyny to the killer's madness (Don't Answer the Phone comes to mind) but, to me, the killers in these movies usually do what they do because they're either insane, want revenge for some wrong that was done to them, or are just plain evil. It's just a pet peeve of mine when people assign Freudian imagery where I don't think there's supposed to be any. Not everything is sexual and people need to get their minds out of the gutter.

Hooper must've been looking at all of this analysis and said, "If you guys want this to be true, then I'll make it literal for you." That first encounter between Stretch and Leatherface has unmistakable sexual overtones, as he turns off the chainsaw, looks at the blade while holding it upright next to him, then runs it gently against the length of Stretch's leg and puts the tip of it right up to her crotch. He then proceeds to all but dry-hump the chainsaw, moaning and breathing heavily while doing so. However, I don't see this as

Leatherface being sexually frustrated, but rather as someone who has the mental development of a child experiencing this sensation the first time, like an adolescent who first feels the effects of puberty. Stretch herself even realizes this is not something that Leatherface is used to, and uses it as a way to keep him from killing her. However, it ends up sending him into a rage when he doesn't know how to handle these emotions and he proceeds to tear the place to pieces, making one final not so subtle gesture

at her with the saw before leaving. To me, that's not subtext but rather something Hooper definitely wanted you to see. Unfortunately, some have attributed more unnecessary undertones to the movie. For instance, in the moment before that, when Leatherface bursts into the room and his chainsaw hits some of the beer cans in the ice tub Stretch is sitting in, it's been said that the beer spraying across Stretch's face is like he just busted off, given the placement of the chainsaw in proportion to his body and such. Since Leatherface hadn't become infatuated

yet and was actually trying to kill her, I don't think that analysis has any merit. (Granted, Hooper himself may have confirmed this intention in an interview I've never seen or read, or on his audio commentary and I just forgot, but this is how I personally view it.) However, there's no denying that Chop Top does seem to get off on scratching his head plate in just the right spot, something both Hooper and Bill Moseley have mentioned before.

The first major scene is when Buzz and Rick run into the Sawyers on the bridge. After they call up Stretch to harass her again, and as she and L.G. try to find a way to get rid of them, they come upon the bridge, where a certain pickup truck is waiting for them. It turns on its bright headlights, as well as some lights atop its hood, and pulls out in front of them, blocking their path. They just sit there for a few seconds, and when Buzz yells at the truck to back up, it does, but does so right alongside them as they drive forward. The two of them start to panic, especially when

Leatherface pops up in the back while puppeteering Nubbins' corpse as it's tied to his front, and then pulls out and cranks up his chainsaw; at the same time, Stretch and L.G. are shocked by the sound of the saw over the phone. Buzz tries to outrun them but the pickup keeps pace with them while still going in reverse, and Leatherface saws through the car's roof, coming very close to hitting Buzz. Buzz tells Rick to shoot him, and he pokes up through the sawed open roof and fires a shot. He hits the corpse's head,

knocking it to the side and revealing Leatherface's actual head. Enraged at this, he repeatedly saws through the door, screaming maniacally, with Buzz leaning up against Rick in an effort to dodge the saw and drive at the same time. As Stretch and L.G. continue listening, Rick fires another a shot at the truck, and then screams in horror when he sees that Buzz's head has been sawed open. As Buzz dies, Rick is stuck in the car that now has no driver, and Stretch hears the crash over the phone.

Later on, at Lefty's urging, Stretch plays the recording of the murder and crash over the airwaves. Upon hearing it, Chop Top calls Drayton, as he drives home from the chili cookoff and has him turn on the radio in his food van. He's none too pleased when he hears it, yelling at both Chop Top and Leatherface for screwing up things for him. He's so upset, in fact, that he has to pull over onto the side of the road. That night at the station, after L.G. leaves, Stretch stays behind, waiting for Lefty to show up, when she gets a phone call, only for no one to say anything when she

answers it. She then hears the caller hang up and, clearly unnerved by this, goes back to what she was doing in the studio. A few seconds later, she hears a commotion outside and, thinking it might be either L.G. or Lefty, goes looking for them. She looks in the storeroom next to the studio, and upon finding no one in there, heads to the lounge area downstairs, seeing a shadow rummaging around through the door's frosted glass. Again thinking it might be Lefty, she goes in, only to be faced with Chop Top, who says he wants to buy some radio ad time, then creepily professes to be

be her biggest fan. After giving him the very short, impromptu "tour" of the station he asks for, Stretch, thoroughly freaked out, tries to encourage him to be on his way but Chop Top isn't willing to go just yet. He then mentions how much he loved Lefty's request and asks her to play it again, then if he could get a copy of it. Upon growing curious about the record vault, he looks in there and switches on the light, upon which Leatherface comes charging out with his chainsaw. He ends up getting Chop Top, knocking

him to the floor, after which he angrily yells at him to get Stretch. Leatherface chases her up the stairs and to the storeroom, where she blasts him in the face with a fire extinguisher, knocking him to the ground. She quickly takes the opportunity to get inside the storeroom, slide the door shut, and put a bolt through the lock. Leatherface futilely tries to open it, then to saw through it, while down below, Chop Top, after getting over what Leatherface did to his Sonny Bonno wig and denting his head-plate, goes through the record vault.

While Stretch tries to figure out what to do, L.G. arrives back at the station with some coffees, only to walk in and see Chop Top in the vault. Just as he yells at him to get out, Leatherface suddenly comes at him from upstairs, sending him tumbling over the railing, across a desk, and onto the floor. Before he knows what happened, Chop Top is on him, whacking him repeatedly with a hammer, as he writhes back and forth, yelling in pain (and continuing to spit). After watching this, Leatherface gets his saw working again and runs back to the storeroom door. Inside, Stretch

grabs some ice tongs to try to defend herself, panicking when she hears the saw stop and the door starts jiggling again. She futilely screams at him to leave her alone, when the jiggling suddenly stops. There's a few moments of quiet, when Leatherface suddenly bursts through the wall to her right, having come through via the studio. Stretch fumbles backwards into the ice tub, trying to avoid the saw, while Leatherface destroys the ceiling fan above him and then plunges the saw into the ice in front of Stretch. It cuts back and forth between this and Chop

Top's continued bludgeoning of L.G., when Leatherface finally stops, while Stretch sits in the tub, frantically yelling in terror. This is when she manages to not only talk him down but use his obvious interest in her to her advantage. However, it seemingly almost backfires when he cranks the saw back up again and, yelling in frustration, goes completely nuts, spinning around, slicing up the boxes and packaging, then runs back into the studio and saws through and smashes the window separating the two booths. After yelling

crazily and making one last sexual gesture towards her, he runs back downstairs, where Chop Top has seemingly finished L.G. off. When Leatherface makes him think that he killed Stretch, the two of them drag L.G. out, Chop Top taking his cowboy hat to make up for his totaled wig. However, Stretch, not wanting them to escape, watches as they pile into their pickup and drive away. Angry that Lefty never showed up, she runs downstairs, gets into her jeep, and follows after them.

Tailing them down the road, she follows them to the abandoned Texas Battle Land amusement park. Not wanting to attract attention, she parks near the entrance and, after the truck rounds a bend up ahead, she turns the jeep off, gets out, and follows after them on foot. But she doesn't get very far before another vehicle comes out of nowhere and starts following her. She runs into the skeleton-like tunnel, keeping the car from directly following her initially, only for it to drive through a large gap. Stretch then sees that the pickup isn't too far ahead, meaning if she runs any

farther, they might spot her. Regardless, she decides to take the chance, only for the person driving the car to disembark and turn out to be none other than Lefty. Just as she processes this, a hatch in the ground opens beneath her feet and she drops down through it. Lefty rushes to her aid, as she grabs onto some thick roots and vines down below. Confessing that he used her as bait, he grabs the nearest thing he can get his hands on to try to pull her out, which turns out to be a discarded arm bone. He reaches it down to her, and while she manages to grab it, it's so brittle that it

breaks and Stretch goes tumbling down various levels. At one point, she manages to grab onto some more vines, but those break and she tumbles further, going down a slide, coming face-to-face with a whole skeleton, and falling through the ground below. Horrified at this, Lefty runs back to his car, gets the chainsaws he bought out of the trunk, and after arming up, charges into the park, yelling at the top of his lungs. Shortly after he runs in, he spots blood trickling down a wall that has a mural of Davey

Crockett painted on it (the blood is actually coming from Crockett's mouth), collecting on the floor next to it. He then kicks the wall open and a huge mass of guts and gore comes spilling out. With that, Lefty revs up his main chainsaw and starts sawing down every support beam he sees, yelling that he's bringing it all down to hell.

When she awakens, Stretch finds herself in the family's smokehouse deep underground. Hearing Drayton and Chop Top arguing outside, she has to take cover and hide when Leatherface walks in. He grabs an electric knife and, at the others' urging, begins skinning L.G.'s body, much to Stretch's disgust, though she can't help but peek around the barrel she's hiding beside. When he removes the face and holds it up, looking at it, Stretch is so disgusted that she accidentally knocks over some metal hooks next to her barrel. The loud clang alerts Leatherface,

who grabs a meat-cleaver and quickly finds Stretch. He's just about to attack her, when she manages to talk him down again. He puts down the cleaver and, despite being nervous about the others finding her, he, like before, gets excited by the sight of her and strokes her hair. Both Chop Top and Drayton come in briefly, the latter growing momentarily suspicious by how Leatherface is acting, thinking he's hiding something, but decides to let it go. Once he's gone, Stretch begs Leatherface for help, but though he nods at her, he then forces her to put on L.G.'s skinned

face, which he's been holding this whole time. Despite being disgusted, she allows him to put it on her, though she tries to then remove it, only for him to stop her. When she acquiesces, Leatherface grabs L.G.'s hat and puts it on her head. He then takes her hands and dances in place with her, even twirling her around, when some falling debris from Lefty's sawing up above distracts him. He quickly grabs a rope, ties Stretch's arms behind her back (specifically, he ties them together, rather than tying the rope both around 

her front and her arms against her back), shoves her down to the ground, and leaves her there, closing the door. Unable to remove the mask, Stretch stumbles towards the smokehouse door, only for the other end of the rope, which is tied to the back wall, to catch. But just as it seems like there's nothing more she can do, L.G., badly skinned but still alive, awakens and sits up, yelling in pain. At first horrified, and not knowing who he is, Stretch becomes all the more distraught when she realizes it's him. He, however, manages to get to his feet, despite stumbling around, and is also able to grab a nearby knife and cut Stretch loose. However, he collapses to the floor and dies, with Stretch tearfully removing his face and putting it back on him.

After this, the film loses any semblance of plot for a while, as it cuts back and forth between Stretch trying to escape, the Sawyers arguing and fighting amongst themselves, and Lefty continuing to try to saw the place down. When Stretch manages to get out of the main chamber, Drayton catches a glimpse of her and sends Leatherface to go see what's going on. Following the moment where Lefty finds Franklin's remains, sending him into a further rage, Stretch reaches the long tunnel filled with skeletons and lights. Ironically, she's about to run to the very corner

he's at, when he starts sawing again. Thinking it's Leatherface, she turns and runs the other way, only for Leatherface to come charging out of another passageway at her. He chases her back down the tunnel, seemingly intent on killing her, and just when she reaches the other end of the tunnel, where Lefty is, he unknowingly cuts off her escape route by sawing through another beam and causing a chunk of the ceiling to collapse in front of her. With no other recourse, she, again, has to face Leatherface and try to

convince him to let her go. That's when Chop Top and Drayton show up and, after learning who she is and about Leatherface's infatuation with her, they knock her unconscious and take her prisoner. She awakens at the dinner table and starts screaming like mad, as Chop Top and Leatherface bring Grandpa over to the table. Like in the first film, they intend to let Grandpa bludgeon her to death, and Leatherface, albeit reluctantly, drags Stretch, kicking and screaming, over to the tub placed in front of Grandpa. He and

Chop Top force her to bend her dead down into the tub, as Grandpa tries to hold onto the hammer and whack her, though he drops it again and again. This time, however, he gets into it more, especially when he tastes some of her spilled blood, and manages to hit her a few times.

Suddenly, there's the sound of a chainsaw and a massive collapse around a huge pipe up in the wall, bringing everything to a complete stop. The Sawyers then hear Lefty singing Bringing in the Sheaves elsewhere, the sound of which echoes throughout the pipes strewn here and there throughout the chamber. Lefty makes his way through one of them and hops down, facing the Sawyers, specifically Drayton and Chop Top. Following Drayton's failed attempt to buy him off, Lefty then sees Stretch when she regains consciousness and sits up out of the tub. This sets him

off, as he revs up his chainsaw, yelling, "Brazos!", and lunges at Drayton and Chop Top as they flee, nailing the former in the rear end as he ducks for cover beneath the dinner table. He saws through the ropes binding Stretch's wrists and sends her off, as he engages Leatherface in a chainsaw duel. Early on, Leatherface pins him up a piece of stage, but Lefty knees him in the gut, then kicks him in the face, sending stumbling backwards, against a pillar. Leatherface retaliates and lunges back at him, but Lefty dodges and he saws through the scenery behind

him. Elsewhere, Stretch tries to find her way out, only to get ambushed by Chop Top, who attacks her from above. She manages to fight him off and run for it, but he chases after her. Back in the dining room, Lefty jumps atop the table, dodging a swing from Leatherface's chainsaw, but Leatherface then manages to knock him back onto the table. He climbs up there with him and the battle continues atop the table, while Grandpa looks around, trying to comprehend what's happening, and Drayton realizes how badly Lefty got

him in his hemorrhoids. With Chop Top still on Stretch's tail, the chainsaw duel comes to a head when Lefty dodges a swing from Leatherface's blade and jams his own saw right through his gut. Down below, Drayton grabs Nubbins' corpse from the table and pulls him under, searching for a "Fuck you, Charlie," while Lefty continues the fight with the two smaller chainsaws he had holstered up until now. Drayton finds what he's looking for, which turns out to be a hand grenade, and pulls the pin on it.

Near the entrance to the lair, Stretch gets tackled by Chop Top and the two of them wrestle across the ground, with Chop Top pinning and attempting to choke her. However, Stretch kicks him in the side while holding him off, then grabs a nearby lamp and jams the light into his plate, electrocuting the crap out of him and making convulse wildly on the ground. She then runs up a flight of stairs next to an exit sign, while down below, Grandpa throws his mallet at Lefty, only for him to miss and whack Leatherface right in the noggin. Grandpa keels over at this, while

Leatherface falls to the table, his saw-blade going through it and getting Drayton's backside. He drops the grenade, and Lefty only has time to hold both of his saws up and yell victoriously, before the grenade explodes. Up near the surface, Chop Top continues chasing Stretch and tries to pull her back down when he catches her. The two of them fight atop the stair-railing that leads up to the artificial mountain peak, with Chop Top whipping out a straight razor. All this does is prompt Stretch to grab and bite into the hand

that's wielding it, and after he wrenches loose and turns around, she jumps on his back and actually bites into his ear. The two of them fall onto a bit of the sloping mountainside next to the stairwell, with Stretch beating on Chop Top before running back up the stairs. Undeterred, Chop Top chases back after her, slashing at her with his razor, and doesn't back down even when she tries to kick him down the stairwell. He slashes at the back of her legs near the top of the structure, and she, in turn, kicks him

uppercut-style straight on the chin, causing him to fall against the railing, which comes loose. He's then hanging above the hole leading back down into the lair, while Stretch climbs on up to the very top of the structure, only to find herself in Chainsaw Heaven, with Great Grandma's corpse.

Chop Top manages to pull himself back onto the stairwell and heads on up, cornering Stretch in the chamber with his razor. Taunting her by saying she's reached "dead end city," and cutting into his own neck to freak her out, he actually spurs Stretch, who's now quite deranged herself, into making a challenging gesture at him. She then spies the chainsaw in Great Grandma's hands and tries to pull it loose, as Chop Top desperately yells at her to get away from his grandmother. After some yanking, she manages to rip the saw loose and it starts up right away, only to

immediately stall out. As Chop Top cries over her, Stretch tries to crank the saw back up. He yells, "You killed her, you hog bitch!", and jumps at her, crazily slashing at her back and laughing maniacally, as she continues trying to get the saw running. She finally does and, the minute he hears it, Chop Top gets off her and backs away. She slices into his midsection and up along his torso, sending him tumbling backwards, out the entrance, and over the edge. He falls to his death and slides down a large pipe leading back down into the lair, while Stretch yells crazily and does her own version of Leatherface's chainsaw dance

Like the original film, the score was the work of Tobe Hooper himself, along with another person, in this case, Jerry Lambert. While the frightening sound design score of the original emphasized its nightmarish quality, this score highlights the sequel's out of control, insane tone, with the main theme, which plays over the opening credits, as well as in various spots throughout the film, sounding like a cross between Bernard Herrmann's main title for Psycho and the sound of, fittingly enough, a maniacal carnival. When you hear this over the opening credits, you know you better be prepared for a wild flick, and the rest of the music is done in just about that same tone. In addition to some other truly crazy themes throughout the score (like for much of the chainsaw duel, which sounds like a church organ going berserk), there are others that are softer and slower paced, notably the eerie, disturbing piece for Chop Top's first appearance and when Leatherface skins L.G.'s face off. Speaking of the latter, when Leatherface then forces Stretch to wear the skinned face and briefly dances with her, the music sounds like what you'd hear in a ballroom, but in a deranged, off-kilter manner, kind of akin to the music heard in Carnival of Souls. One interesting musical moment happens in the scene where Lefty tests out his large chainsaw on the log outside of the hardware store, which is scored to some creepy clanging and banging noises that sound very similar to that of the original movie. It's kind of buried underneath the sound of the saw but still, watch that scene again and listen to it closely. And going back to the chainsaw duel, during the latter part of it, the music suddenly turns into the rocking sort of sound that's unlike any other part of the score. It's really cool, though.

Also like the original, there are a good number of songs on the soundtrack which, like the score, highlight the film's madcap and bizarre tone. The first thing you hear after the ending credits is Shame On You by Timbuk3 and, like the main theme, it tells you what kind of movie you're in for, as it plays to Rick the Prick shooting the mailboxes and signs on the side of the road. (It's also funny that the song starts with the word, "Chain." First time I watched the movie, I was expecting it to say, "Saw," afterward.) I know now that, when he drives back to the station, L.G. was listening to the song Haunted Head by Concrete Blonde on his jeep radio, which explains why he randomly sang after getting out, but that doesn't make it any less random. There are other songs, like Goo Goo Muck by The Cramps and No One Lives Forever by Oingo Boingo, the latter of which plays all throughout the scene where Buzz and Rick are chased and murdered (very fitting, given the title, isn't it?), but the last one I really want to comment on is Strange Things Happen by Stewart Copeland, this rather calm, country song that plays over the ending credits. After the insanity that the film ended on, I think it's nice that they chose something like this to play us out, but despite its rather relaxed sound, what it's saying fits very well with what you've just seen. You hear the lyrics, "Strange things happen that they never told you about at home," and all you can think is, "You're damn right!"

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is definitely a love it or hate it kind of flick. Personally, I like it a lot. It may be really crazy, without much semblance of a plot, during much of the latter half, with parts that are just out there, weird, and random, and a portrayal of Leatherface that's problematic, but on the whole, it's a fun, gory, very quirky black comedy of a horror film with memorable characters, good performances, intelligent satire, a really nice visual aesthetic and inspired art direction, and a bizarre music score. The only stipulation I'd charge for first time viewers is that they think long and hard about what type of movie they want. If you're a huge fan of the original and want more of its intense tone and gritty visuals, you'd better look elsewhere. But if you're willing to think of this as a completely different type of movie and enjoy it for what it has to offer, which is a lot, then you'll have fun with it. In short, accept it for what it is or don't watch it all.