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

Initially, after seeing the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the 2003 remake, I had decided that I would go no further. Part of it was because of the consensus that the sequels to the original didn't count, that they weren't very good, that they crapped on the awesomeness that was the original, made a mockery of it, and so on. I guess I didn't want to taint my impressions of what I thought were two really good horror films. For a while after I first saw those two movies, I kept that initiative. But, when I was shopping around for my eighteenth birthday in the summer of 2005 (instead of giving me presents, my family just gives me money so I can buy whatever I want), I spotted the DVDs for both the second and third films. I decided, "What the heck?" and just got them. I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I went into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. While I had actually heard some decent things about the third movie, Leatherface (two classmates at my high school who were normally very stuck up about movies said they thought both it and the original were awesome flicks), the consensus on the second one was more mixed. I had heard that it was much more comedic and gorier than the original, which no doubt explained why popular opinion on it was so split. While John Stanley in his Creature Features review book gave it a fairly decent review (he gave both it and Leatherface a three star rating), when Leonard Maltin went through Tobe Hooper's career in his articles that used to be on IMDB, he simply said that the less said about the movie, the better. In general, most of the word of mouth was bad. But, always deciding to make up my own mind about movies, I popped the DVD in one morning and watched it.

After it was over, all I could think was, "Well, that was... interesting." Actually, I wasn't even sure if I liked it or not. I did agree that it was more comedic and gory than the original but what nobody warned me about was just how insane it was. Remember back when I was talking about how I heard so many stories about the original and how I thought it sounded like the epitome of madness on film? Well, I was wrong. This was the epitome of madness on film! The latter half of the movie in the underground lair of the family especially was just bonkers. You got Dennis Hopper running around and sawing everything while screaming, "Bring it all down!" and "I'll take you back to hell!", Chop Top and Drayton arguing and with Drayton complaining about how business sucks, Leatherface trying to get with his would-be girlfriend, and it all culminates in a recreation of the dinner scene and a chainsaw duel between Hopper and Leatherface while Chop Top chases after Caroline Williams' Stretch. It's crazy. Like I said, I didn't know what to think about it after I came out of that first viewing. I liked some parts of it but the rampant black humor and sheer insanity of it really put me off so much that I didn't know whether I was coming or going. However, after subsequent viewings, the film really grew on me (much like how the original did) and now I can say that, while I don't think it's perfect, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is an insane but very fun and entertaining film.

Over a decade after the events of the original film, two rowdy high school seniors who have been creating havoc along the road while on their way to a big party are attacked by Leatherface who, while standing in the back of a pickup truck drive by another family member, chainsaws their car and kills one of them while the other is killed when the car eventually crashes. This "accident" attracts the attention of Lieutenant Lefty Enright, the uncle of Sally and Franklin Hardesty from the original, who has been tracking the chainsaw killers all over the state of Texas. A local officer tells Enright not to cause a panic by going around and spreading stories about chainsaw killers but Enright, nonetheless, puts an article out in the paper asking for any eyewitnesses to come forward. Stretch, a DJ for a local radio station who was on the phone with the two teenagers when they were attacked and recorded it as she does all of the station's call-ins, comes forward to talk with Enright and while he's initially reluctant to accept her help, he eventually advises her to play the recording on the radio, saying that 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 family and circumstances eventually lead to her being trapped in their nightmarish underground lair beneath an abandoned amusement park. Now Enright must not only avenge what happened to his niece and nephew but rescue Stretch as well, whom Leatherface has become enfatuated with despite his family's orders to kill her.

While I wouldn't say that he was necessarily past his prime, at this point in his career Tobe Hooper wasn't exactly on Hollywood's A-lst of directors either. While The Texas Chainsaw Massacre had become a legendary horror film, most of his other films had met with little to no success or acclaim and while he had directed the big hit Poltergeist, the rumors that Steven Spielberg had actually directed the movie instead of him didn't help Hooper get more big projects. Plus, I think Hooper had developed a bad habit of smoking weed a lot during this period, which had given him a reputation of being unreliable. In any case, though, he had gotten a three-picture deal with Cannon Films and this film was the final part of that deal, with the other two movies having been Lifeforce and the remake of Invaders from Mars. Hooper, like John Carpenter and Wes Craven, wasn't all that keen on directing a sequel to his most well-known film but eventually decided that if he was going to do a sequel, he might as well do something other than rehash the original film. The movie initially was pitched as being on a much bigger scale, with an entire town of cannibals and its original title was to be Beyond the Valley of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (although that title would never fit on a marquee). However, Cannon Films didn't like that idea and so, Hooper brought on L.M. Kit Carson, who wrote what would eventually become the finished film. I say eventually because, due to budget cuts by the ever cheap Cannon Films, the script had to be constantly rewritten during filming, with Carson saying that the script looked like a rainbow with all of the different colored pages that were part of it by the time it was finished.

Like I said, Hooper had decided early on that he didn't want to do the same type of movie as the original (also, I think he had learned his lesson after Eaten Alive, his 1977 effort at making a similar movie only with a bit more money, failed miserably) and so, he and Carson went for a black comedy approach. Hooper said that he was always disappointed that nobody saw the humor that was in the original and so, he decided to bring it front and center with the sequel. There's also some satirie on horror movies as well as popular movies in general throughout the film, which I'll get into presently, but the film is first and foremost a gruesome black comedy. And you can tell just by looking at it that it is a Tobe Hooper film. I'll give Hooper this: even though I don't like a lot of his films, you can tell that a movie is his simply by watching it. Like John Carpenter, George Romero, and Wes Craven or even directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, James Cameron, and Steven Spielberg, Hooper has a style of filmmaking that is instantly recognizable and is uniquely him. For better or worse, nobody else makes movies quite the way he does, so I have to give him some acknowledgement on that score.

Like the original film, this movie benefits from having some good actors who give really good, likable performances (especially given how there isn't much of a plot during the latter half of it). And, unlike most horror films of the time, they're all adult actors save for the two high-schoolers who get killed at the beginning. In any case, it's a shame that the late Dennis Hopper never thought much of this movie because he gives a memorable performance as Lieutenant Lefty Enright. He has a personal vendetta against the family since he's the uncle of Sally and Franklin Hardesty and there are moments where you see how much he cares about them. The biggest one for me is when he finds Franklin's remains in the family's lair. I think this is Hopper's best piece of acting in the film. You can see how devastated he is by the find and this makes him even more determined to wipe out the family. I kind of wish there was a moment where he talked about visiting Sally wherever she is since, according to the opening crawl, she sank into catatonia after being picked up at the end of the original. If Franklin's remains infuriated him, I'm sure that seeing his beloved niece alive but reduced to a shell of a human being would have given us even more insight to his decision to hunt down and destroy the chainsaw family.

While Lefty's determination to hunt down the family makes him the hero of the film, it's also obvious that his obsession with doing so over the years has driven him insane. He may have already been a little unstable beforehand and this whole thing just pushed him over the edge but you can tell early on that he's not quite right in the head. When Stretch first visits him in his hotel room, it's clear that he's been up all night and with those dark circles around his eyes, he looks crazed. This is punctuated even more so when he tells Stretch that he has no fear left in him and after she leaves, he looks at his hand and says, "I ain't got no fear left, Lord." One scene that I really like with Lefty is when he goes to a local hardware store and loads up on chainsaws, getting two small ones that he later puts on either side of his waist like holsters and then gets one really big one. I like how the manager of the store is just staring at Lefty the whole time because of how bizarre he's acting (Lefty just gives him the money and doesn't say anything as he tests out the lightness of the smaller chainsaws by swinging them around, forcing the guy to slightly dodge one of them). One aspect of Lefty that could have potentially made him unlikable is that he sets Stretch up. He tells her to play her recording of the murder of the two high school seniors over the radio so people will take it more seriously but, in reality, he knows that this will attract the attention of the family. He uses Stretch as bait to lure them out so he can follow them back to their hideout. And we know all this because when he shows up at the amusement park after Stretch has followed them there, he admits it. In most movies, this would make us lose sympathy with Lefty. However, after Stretch falls into the family's lair, Lefty realizes what he's done and decides to save her as well as destroy the family and their lair. At the climax, he frees Stretch from being tied up by the family and fights them off while she escapes, which shows his truly good nature. And long before that, when he first enters the lair, he's horrified by a wall full of guts that he discovers, saying, "It's the devil's playground!" and that's when he starts tearing the place apart with his own chainsaw. He may be truly insane by this point but he does have pure intentions. It doesn't hurt that Dennis Hopper has a lot of memorable lines like, "I'll take you back to hell!", "Bring it all down!", and, "I'm the Lord of the Harvest." The only line of his that I don't get is a word that repeats throughout the film: "Brazos." I took Spanish all throughout high school and I even have a Spanish dictionary that I used back then but when I looked up "brazos," all I could find was "braza," which means, "arm." There is a masculine equivalent of that with the letter "o" that creates the word "brazo" but it still just means arm. So, Lefty is just saying, "Arms?" What is that supposed to mean? Maybe I'm missing something but the significance of that flies right over my head.

Caroline Williams plays one really cool horror movie heroine in the form of Texas DJ Stretch (apparently, the character's real name is Vanita but I don't remember that being said in the film). She's everything you want in this type of character. First off, she's really sexy, with a nice face, short-shorts that show off some awesome legs, and a Texan accent that adds even more to her charm. Second, you totally buy her as a DJ, with her energy and enthusiasm when she's answering call-ins and the know-how with which she operates everything in her studio. If somebody like her was the DJ, I would actually listen to the local radio stations around here. Third, she's determined to do the right thing. When she sees Lefty's article in the newspaper, she comes straight to him and offers her help. Granted, one motivation is that she wants to go onto something more than being DJ, possibly a reporter judging from her "coverage" of the chili cook-off later at the hotel, but she does say that the sounds of the tape really got to her and, therefore, she couldn't just erase it per studio regulations. And, despite the terrifying attack that she suffered from Leatherface and Chop Top at the radio station, she decides to follow them after they leave, not wanting them to get away. She didn't have to do that but she wants to help stop them from killing any more innocent people. Fourth, like any good horror movie heroine, she can scream... boy, can she scream! I don't know whose screams are more piercing, hers or Marilyn Burns, but, in any case, Williams gives Burns a run for her money in terms of being a scream queen. Heck, I dare say that she even rivals Fay Wray! There are moments where she tries to say something while screaming but you almost can't make it out because of how much the scream bleeds into it. It doesn't make me dislike her but, still, there are moments in the movie where I'm kind of like, "Stop screaming!" And, finally, despite her constant screaming, she's not a weak character at all. She's actually far stronger than Sally was. Like Sally, she manages to get herself out of tight spots but, besides just running away, she manages to somewhat keep her wits about her and use her brains and some fast-talking, like when Leatherface is attacking her in the radio station and she's able to talk him down. And she'll fight back when she's pushed. When Chop Top is chasing her all over the lair at the end of the movie, there are moments where he catches up with her and slashes and beats on her but she fights back, dishing out just as much punishment, biting both his wrist and ear at one point, and ultimately attacking Chop Top with a chainsaw and sending him falling to his doom. Like Sally, it does seem as if she's lost her mind by the end of the movie, where she dances around with the saw like how Leatherface did at the end of the original but since she briefly appears in the next one, maybe it was just temporary insanity caused by all that had happened. In any case, Stretch is by far one of the best lead females of horror films, be it of the 80's or any period.

Another character that I really like is the late Lou Perryman (who, sadly, was murdered in 2009) as Stretch's co-worker, L.G. Perryman was just one of those actors that, while not the most handsome person ever, had such a likable, Southern charisma about him that he could easily sweep any woman off her feet and he brought that to the role of L.G. The guy is smitten with Stretch, constantly calling her "darling" and doing stuff to try to get her attention, like building her a little house made out of french fries at one point (that's some dedication, there), but she makes it clear that she just likes him as a friend. He has some great, memorable moments in the film too. 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 an endearing character trait. I like some of the stuff that he has in his section of the radio station, particularly that sticker that says DAMN, I'M GOOD. That's just great. And one moment that I always smile at is when he gets out of his truck at the radio station after getting some coffee and suddenly sings, "Words inside your haunted head!" The first time I watched this movie, I just remember laughing and saying, "What the hell was that?!" because it's so random. Finally, even though Stretch waves off his affections several times, he still tries, though, God bless him, and by the time he dies after having been skinned alive, Stretch realizes that he was more than a friend to her, saying out loud that she loves him. That's a really sad moment too, particularly when he says, "Looks like I'm falling apart on you, honey," right before he keels over and moans, "No," afterward while reaching out to her before he ultimately does die. It shows that his enfatuation with her wasn't just physical, that he really did care about her, to the point where he cut her loose from the rope she was tied up with despite the excruciating pain he must have been in after being skinned alive. A sad end to a great character.

Before I talk about the members of the cannibal family, I have to address the name that's given to them in this film: Sawyer. I've never liked that because it's so obvious. They could have given them any name possible but, nope, let's just call them Sawyer due to the association with the chainsaw. Just stupid. Anyway, Hooper must have realized that Leatherface was the aspect of the original film that everybody remembered because here, you see at the very beginning of the movie when he attacks the two obnoxious high school seniors who are on the phone with Stretch. Bill Johnson, the guy is credited with playing Leatherface, actually isn't in the movie for as much as you would think. Veteran stuntman Tom Morga played him during the aforementioned attack on the high schoolers and during much of the action scenes when he's running around with the chainsaw, he's played by another stuntman, Bob Elmore. Johnson mainly appears in the scenes where Leatherface is required to show some emotion, like when he's interacting with Stretch and the other family members (if you know what his face looks like, you can tell when it's him; also, his mask appears different from the ones that the stuntmen wear). The reason that Johnson isn't in the film that much is because he abhors violence. The obvious question is, "Then why did you take part in a movie called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, let alone in the role of the chainsaw-wielding killer himself?" Bill Johnson is a strange guy anyway so I guess it doesn't really matter. (I met him briefly at a convention and while he was nice enough to me, I've heard from many people that he is odd.)

A lot of people crap on the portrayal of Leatherface (or Bubba, as Chop Top calls him) in this film. They don't like the idea of him becoming enfatuated with Stretch and they say that he's nothing like the character that Gunnar Hansen played in the original. I can totally see that criticism. He isn't the terrifying, screaming man-child from the first film who would bludgeon or slice to pieces anything that moved. Here, he only directly kills one person, although you could say that he did cause the car crash that killed the other teenager and that his skinning alive of L.G. did lead to his death. But, I will say that I do like that they made Leatherface a bit more of a character in this film. Now, do I prefer the screaming killing machine from the first movie? Absolutely. But I don't mind the way he is here. I've heard some say they made Leatherface a pussy in this movie. Well, if you think about it, he was kind of a pussy in the original with how cowered in fear from the old man and that's the same thing I see here. He still takes plenty of abuse from Drayton but, otherwise, 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 killed only one person, it was a brutal kill nonetheless. 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 (never mind the question of how he's still alive for future movies after that). To me, Leatherface is a bit more complex in this film but he's not a pussy. If you want to see Leatherface turned into a pussy, watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it but, for now, I'll say that this Leatherface can beat the hell out of that... thing (I don't refer to that character as Leatherface if I can help it). As for the scenes between Leatherface and Stretch here, I think they're well done. They've got a very odd Beauty and the Beast aspect to them, with Leatherface at first trying to attack her but when she talks him down, he becomes curious about her and then grows enfatuated. There are some very overt overtones regarding the saw in their first scene that I'll get into shortly but, in any case, you can sense how torn Leatherface is between his family's orders to kill and these feelings he's developing for Stretch. When he can't figure out what to do or how to satisfy his needs with Stretch, he flies into a rage and destroys everything around him, and later deceives Chop Top into thinking that he did kill Stretch. He becomes even more conflicted later on when Stretch appears inside the family's lair. Once again, he almost kills her but Stretch talks him down and he experiences weird emotions for her again. This leads to a surreal moment where he puts L.G.'s skinned face onto hers like a mask, puts L.G.'s cowboy hat on her as well, 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. In any case, he put the face onto Stretch in an attempt to hide her (how expected that to work, I don't know) because he obviously wants to keep her without his family knowing 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 (starting to see a pattern, here?) My favorite bit of acting from Johnson is when Drayton and Chop Top come across Stretch and Drayton realizes who she is, you can see this, "Oh, shit," look that Leatherface is giving behind his mask. It's also funny when Drayton, frustrated at Leatherface's reluctance to finish Stretch off, takes the saw away from him and says, "Wait till Grandad hears about this," which causes him to bang his head against a little birdcage in frustration. Even at the dinner table, Leatherface is trying to comfort Stretch while she's screaming like mad, despite the fact that he is going to allow his brother and Grandpa to bludgeon her to death. You have to feel sorry for Leatherface about how much he's confused and doesn't know what to do. Unfortunately for him, his decision to turn, "traitor for a piece of tail," doesn't save Stretch from almost being killed by his family and he's forced to face off with Lefty instead which, supposedly, leads to him getting blown to smithereens.

As I said back in my review for the original, I've always felt that they could never get Leatherface's mask right in any of the sequels or remakes. I guess since he's not exactly the same character as he was in the original, that mask would feel out of place but the mask here just looks strange. I know Tom Savini has said that he wanted the mask to look like it was made out of several different faces but to me, it simply looks like a Leatherface Halloween mask and a very overdone one at that. (They also ignored the original idea that he has a different mask for a different occasion since he only wears one no matter what he's doing in this film.) It looks less like it's actually made out of stretched and dried human skin as the masks in the original did and rather like it is made out of latex. Plus, the hair's too much for me. It looks like he has an afro. In fact, it may be an afro for all I know (I'm not that knowledgable when it comes to hairstyles). One thing I know is that, for the first half of the movie, Leatherface's clothes are quite snazzy, with that black suit jacket, white shirt and black tie underneath, black dress pants, and black gloves. It's kind of like the suit he wore during the last bit of the original movie only less dirty. When we first see him in the underground lair, though, he's back to wearing the butcher's apron that he wore throughout most of the original, albeit with a different shirt underneath. Sound-wise, the yells that Leatherface makes here are nowhere near as frightening as the ones that Gunnar Hansen emitted. It's just typical yelling is all it is, although I will say that hearing Leatherface sing in a mumbled way to himself while butchering L.G. is kind of funny. Finally, I have to mention this weird dance that Leatherface does throughout the movie when he has his chainsaw. No, it's not the dance that he ended the original movie with but, rather, it's this thing where he'll rock back and forth in place while holding his chainsaw above his head. And he doesn't do it once or twice but constantly throughout the film. Any time he has the chainsaw, he does that dance. It's not annoying or anything but it's just a noticeable odd quirk that he has here.

Jim Siedow reprises his role as the old man, whose name is revealed to be Drayton Sawyer here, making the only actor from the original movie to do so (this also ended up being the last movie he would ever do; he concentrated solely on his theater career after this, eventually retired, and passed away in 2003). In this film, Drayton has moved on from running a decrepit old gas station in the middle of nowhere to running a sort of meals-on-wheels food van and has become a local celebrity in the town that this film takes place in due to his chili, which wins him awards. 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 good meat but in private, he shows that he's an angry, abusive bully of a person who berates and beats on Leatherface and Chop Top. Throughout this movie, he's constantly complaining about how hard it is to run a small business such as this (despite the fact that his business differs from the norm since he's turning people into barbecue), with quotes such as, "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 plooey! The Gods just kick him right in the balls." I also think it's funny how, when confronted by Lefty at the end of the film, Drayton thinks he's from another food business and is trying to sabotage his. He says, "Who sentcha? Those sissies over at Delmar catering? That chicken-shit burrito man?" And he also says, "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 Lefty proclaims, "I'm the Lord of the Harvest," and Drayton's response, "Who's that? Some new health food bunch?" Even funnier is what happens right after that. Lefty starts up his chainsaw, rushes at the family, and chainsaws Drayton right in the hemorrhoids! Drayton even crawls underneath the table for cover and says out loud how he badly he got his "hems." That's just great.

There are some new aspects of Drayton this time around as well. The most noticeable one is how he's much more sadistic here than he was originally. If you remember, in the original movie he was actually torn between taking part in his family's grisly crimes and feeling a bit disturbed at the prospect of killing people, saying that he just couldn't take any pleasure in it. You don't see any of that here at all. Drayton is now willing to kill anybody and use their meat to sell as barbecue for the unsuspecting locals, particularly with a big football game drawing many more people to the area. When Leatherface is reluctant to kill Stretch because of his enfatuation with her, Drayton, who originally was telling him to do so, instead decides to put Stretch through the same torturous dinner experience that they put Sally through. And when Grandpa is once again unable to kill his intended victim due to his frailness, 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." There's one point where he does act like an older brother to Leatherface. He tries to talk him out of his desire to be with Stretch, telling him that sex is nothing but a scam and even tells Stretch to leave Leatherface alone, like she's corrupting him. That does feel like something someone who has been burned by women many times would say to his younger brother. In fact, 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." So, Drayton does see himself as having done everything he possibly can for his siblings despite how much he abuses them, much like how an abusive parent may think that they're doing the right thing but don't comprehend that they're actually doing more harm than good. Case in point: when Leatherface can't bring himself to kill Stretch, Drayton angrily takes his chainsaw away and growls, "Turned traitor for a piece of tail. Wait till Grandad hears about this." And, finally, that leads me to the line that Drayton utters beforehand that has become synonomous with this franchise. He tells Leatherface, "You have one choice, boy: sex or the saw. Sex is, well, nobody knows, but the saw, the saw is family." That right there tells you his family's philosophy and why he's so angered when Leatherface doesn't kill Stretch.

Leatherface may have been the character that everyone remembers from the original film as well as from the franchise in general but as far as this movie goes, the family member that steals the show is Bill Moseley as Chop Top . I've never heard anybody say anything negative about this character, even those who don't like the movie. The reason for that is Moseley did an amazing job of creating such a demented and yet funny character that it's really hard not to enjoy him. At first, I thought that Chop Top was the hitchhiker from the original film and that the plate in his head was due to an operation that they had to perform in order to save his life. It wasn't until I read up on the movie and did some research 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 metal plate in his head. Moseley did such a good job of emulating Ed Neal's speech patterns and quirky movements from the original that I wouldn't be surprised if others initially thought that he was meant to be the same character as well. In any case, his first appearance is very memorable and is actually pretty creepy with the way the radio station is lit with the red lights and the idea that Stretch is all alone with this weirdo. He immediately makes an impression, from his bizarre look with the pale skin, dark glasses, ugly teeth, Sonny Bonno wig, and hippy-style clothing to his strange speech patterns and voice and his habit of lighting the tip of a coat hanger with a lighter and scratching his head with it (you eventually find out that he's scratching his metal plate and is eating the little bits of flesh that come off when he does so). Just like his brother (whose corpse he carries around throughout the film like a puppet), Chop Top is very a sadistic individual, perhaps even more so. In the original film, the hitchhiker (or Nubbins, as they call him here), did some sadistic stuff like slashing Franklin's arm, taking pleasure out of physically and mentally torturing poor Sally while she was held prisoner in their hosue, making fun of her pleas of mercy at one point, and even slashed at her repeatedly when she escaped before he was finally run over by the cattle truck but I think Chop Top trumps him here. He beats the living crap out of L.G. with a mallet and continues to mock him while doing so, is constantly running around and laughing while him and his family are doing the most hideous things, clearly enjoying it, and the last part of the movie involves him relentlessly chasing and attacking Stretch as she tries to find a way out of the lair, all the while laughing like the maniac he is. We also find out that he has a knack for mutilating himself just like his brother did, although he actually cuts across his neck and seems to enjoy it more since he continues to smile while doing so (at least his brother made some pained facial expressions when he cut his hand open).

As sadistic and twisted as he is, Chop Top is really funny as well. He has so many memorable lines throughout the movie, 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 part that cracks me up is when Leatherface first appears at the radio station and he accidentally hits Chop Top while going for Stretch. Chop Top yells, "Not me, dumbass! Her! Get the girl!" and later on, he's yelling, "Ow, ow, ow, ow, he dented my plate! Oh, my brain is burning! Nam flashback! Nam flashback!" When looks down at his destroyed wig, he yells, "Leatherface, you bitch! Look what you did to my Sonny Bonno wig! Goddamn it! You're gonna have to buy me a new plate cover!" (This is only one of two moments where Chop Top 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: Nam Land and he spends one section of the movie 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 I won't spoil any more for those who haven't seen the movie. Check it out and see for yourself just how great of a character he is.

And finally, we have the return of old Grandpa, this time played Ken Evert. I must say that I enjoy Grandpa more here than I did in the original. While his makeup was very impressive, John Dugan really did nothing in the original except sit around and come across like a corpse more than anything else (as I said in that review, I'm sure that's all the script called for but still, it's the truth that he didn't do much in his scenes). Evert actually gives Grandpa a personality and does some acting within the makeup. He gives a perverted smile when Stretch is given to him at the dinner table, licks the ladle that he's given, and actually gets into his attempts to kill Stretch, with a crazed look growing across his face as he does so and when he tastes some of her blood, he drools over the taste of it and seems to want more. Even though Grandpa can still barely hold onto the mallet, here he actually reaches for it himself when he drops it and does manage to hit Stretch pretty hard before Drayton gets impatient and clubs her himself. While there's still a bit of the humor from the original that Drayton is going about how great Grandpa was as a butcher but now he can't really do much, Grandpa not only manages to hit Stretch fairly hard at one point but when Leatherface and Lefty are having their chainsaw duel, he 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, how he was thrown a barbecue every spring as celebration of his butchering skills, and we also hear about the automation of the slaughterhouse. But now we're told that, rather than being driven out of work by the new ways, as the hitchhiker originally suggested, the family quit working at the slaughterhouse because Grandpa, disgusted with these new techniques, couldn't take the "shame" of it anymore and just stopped going in to work. That makes me wonder how long ago we're talking about here 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 of it is just a creation of his warped mind). And, finally, while we're on the subject of Grandpa, let's mention that the corpse of the family's Great Grandma is kept preserved in a monument called Chainsaw Heaven above the amusement park. How is she better preserved than the skeletal Grandma seen in the house in the original film? And, for that matter, where was she in that film? These are not meant as criticisms, mind you, but just interesting stuff to think about. Also, I wonder if she was actually alive before Stretch tore the chainsaw out of her arms since her head seems to move a little bit by itself to apparently 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 I still wonder about that tiny moment.

There are also a few interesting minor characters in the film as well. The most obnoxious ones are the very first ones we see, Buzz (Barry Kinyon) and Rick the Prick (Chris Douridas), the two rowdy high school seniors who cause havoc on the road while on their way to the football game and the after party. Even for a couple of guys who are intoxicated, the stuff that they do is unbelievable. Rick has a freaking Magnum that he uses to shoot at mailboxes and road signs! How in the hell do they not get pulled over for that? They about scare the crap out of this poor guy who's also on the road by playing chicken with him, eventually forcing him into the ditch. And, finally, they call Stretch on her radio show, harass her, and tie up the line by refusing to hang up. What a couple of dicks! They deserve everything that they have coming to them. There's also Kirk Sisco as a detective who appears in the first scene with Lefty and is the one who warns him not to go around talking about the "supposed" chainsaw killers. I just remember because, after Lefty drives away while saying, "Brazos," he says, "Remember the Alamo, cowboy," and clicks his tongue. I don't know why I mentioned that but it's just one of those odd things that stick in my mind even though there's no reason for it to do so. And, finally, there's another character like that: the guy who owns the hardware store that Lefty buys his chainsaws from (James N. Harrell). I remember him because of a strange line that he says when Lefty is testing the large chainsaw out on a 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 he said the former, which is what the captions on the old DVD claimed he said, then I have to ask, as calmly as I can, "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 to myself is, "Tobe Hooper, you are weird!"

Like the original, the look of the film matches its tone perfectly. In the original, you had the gritty 16mm photography, the sweltering hot wasteland of the landscape, and the horrifyingly real look of the inside of the family's house with the bone furniture and whatnot. Here, the look is in line with this film's over the top tone. It actually starts off looking fairly normal with the roadways, the hotel, the hardware store, and the radio station. Besides the typical "movie" photography that this film is shot through, there's no indication that it's extremely hot this time around either (although, I know it was from the featurettes about the making of the film on the 2006 Gruesome Edition DVD). So, for the first half of the movie, it's fairly typical stuff. But, then, as the film becomes more chaotic, the look changes accordingly. Notice that the radio station is lit in a normal way for the most part but, then, when Chop Top makes his first appearance there, the lighting becomes much more surreal and sinister with the red and green colors that you see. And then, after Stretch follows Chop Top and Leatherface back to their hideout, we enter the madness that is their lair, and, by extension, their world, beneath the amusement park for the rest of the film. We started out normal and harmless and now, we've fallen into hell (literally, since Stretch does actually fall into the heart of the place through the ground). The look of the underground lair is the design highlight of the film and when you realize that this film was shot for an estimated $4.7 million on a very tight schedule, it's amazing what production designer Cary White and his crew were able to accomplish.

The underground lair was actually an abandoned printing factory that was, by all accounts, a massive place, which is why you get the enormous feeling of scale in this part of the film. They took that plant and turned into a surreal madhouse, hanging bones and pieces of meat from up above, putting in enormous sewer pipes that a person can walk through and creating a system of tunnels out of them, filling it with dirt and earth, and shooting a lot of it through a haze of smoke and dust with shafts of light here and there that add to the atmosphere. And they made sure to make it feel like a place that you don't want to be. There's clutter everywhere, it's dirty and filthy, like I said, there's dust and smoke in the air, the little shed-like area where Leatherface does his butchering has hooks with meat attached to them hanging from the ceiling, Lefty discovers that some parts of the wall have guts packed in behind them, and the dinner table is far more disgusting here than it was in the original with bones, plates, and filth strewn everywhere. They still make furniture out of bones as we can see, and, once again, Hooper and his crew used real animal bones to do so. There's even a rat that sticks its head up out of the trophy that Drayton won for his chili. Heck, there even was chili in the bowl part of the trophy that the rat is in at one point, which is even more disgusting. The most interesting part of the lair is this long tunnel that's filled to the brim with old lights, lamps, and Christmas lights as well as the skeletons of some of their past victims, like those that are sitting on beach chairs, strewn here and there and such (I'm not sure if those human skeletons are real or not but, given how Hooper used real human bones on both the original film and Poltergeist, I wouldn't be surprised if they were). You also get the feeling that there are various levels to the place, with the apparent room of skeletons that Stretch slides into before falling into the heart of the lair (somehow they managed to get bones into the sides of the earth along that slide) and the scaffolding-like walkway that she and Chop Top climb up on during the last part of the movie. And while there wasn't a feeling of extreme heat beforehand, I do think that you do get that sense in the lair. Like the original, they filmed in Texas during a hot summer and I've heard that it was like 120 degrees inside that printing plant that they filmed in. I really do think you can feel the stifling heat in that section of the movie inside the lair with all of the dust and smoke in the air and so on. It looks like you could choke in there. The family not only created their own world beneath the amusement park but they expanded it to up top as well, since they turned one of the highest parts of the park into Chainsaw Heaven where Great Grandma is kept (which is complete with a tiny carousel-like structure with bones hanging from it I might add). Heck, I would say that this amusement park itself probably attracted the family since the entrance to it looks like you're driving through the skeleton of a giant monster. Bottom line, whether you like the film or not, you can't deny that the design of the family's lair is amazing and is a great piece of macabre surrealism.

Since he decided that this film, unlike the original, would be an over the top gorefest, Tobe Hooper decided to go with the best and hire gore-meister Tom Savini to do the effects. By this point, Savini's reign as the master of splatter was coming to an end. The movies that really showed off his talents like Dawn of the Dead, Friday the 13th, and Day of the Dead were behind him now and this was one of the last films where he really got to strut his stuff. For my money, most of the effects here work but there are others that are a little suspect. A great one is the opening kill where Leatherface cuts Buzz's head open and it lets you know what you're in for here. The sight of that guy's head slowly opening up to the right and blood pouring out while he convulses is very effective. Unfortunately, the reverse shot of it looks a little silly, with the blood just spraying up into the air out of a hollowed out head and you can tell that it's a dummy. Even Tom Savini himself says that he's not proud of that shot but oh, well. One effect that makes me squirm is when Chop Top bludgeons L.G. with the mallet. I think the chaotic action of the moment, the editing, Bill Moseley coming down crazily with that hammer as Lou Perryman reacts to it while laying there, and the pool of blood beneath L.G.'s head all give it a very viseral feeling and it does look like he's being bludgeoned to death. Even more horrific is when L.G. is skinned alive. The sight of him standing there in just his boxers with big chunks of his legs and torso flayed off along with his face makes you go, "Aah!" because it's so realistic looking. He kinds of looks how the character of Uncle Frank from Hellraiser would look with his exposed ribs and muscle on his chest as well as the skinned parts of his legs (the sections on his face are really excruciating to look at for me). The way he yells when he first regains consciousness also makes you wince because you think of the pain he must be in. So, that's a great effect. The one that I'm not so sure about is his skinned face. Now, don't get me wrong. It's very realistic in how it looks. It really looks like a freshly skinned face with the moist texture of it and so on. But here's the thing: to me, it looks like a skinned face but it doesn't quite look L.G.'s face to me. I'm sure that they used molds of Perryman's real face to make it (I think they did, anyway) but it doesn't look like it to me. When Stretch puts L.G.'s face back on him after he dies, it doesn't look like it matches to me. It just looks as if she put a mask over his skinned face instead of actually putting his face back onto him. I know I'm probably not sounding fair and coming across as a perfectionist but that's the honest feeling that I've always gotten ever since I first saw the film.

Tom Savini has said that his design on Grandpa is the piece of work that he did in his career that he's the most proud of and I'm not inclined to disagree with him. Not only do I like the character of Grandpa better here than in the original, I also prefer this design as well. Ken Evert, the actor who played Grandpa, was so thin that it really makes you feel like this is a frail old and, as Savini himself also commented on, his eyes were so sunken into his head that the closeup of his face that you see at one point is really cool when you add the old makeup and the murky contacts he wears to it. Bottom line, not only does Grandpa act great here but he looks great as well. The effect in the film that I'm the least keen on, though, is when Leatherface takes a chainsaw all the way through him during his duel with Lefty. While I do think it shows just how tough Leatherface is, my problem is the way the fake stomach looks. It's huge! It looks as if Leatherface's 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 bloated stomach doesn't look right to me. Like the reverse shot of the first kill, it looks silly and not in a good way that would benefit the film either. One final bit of bloodletting I want to mention is during the final scuffle between Stretch and Chop Top. It's always the little subtle things that make me cringe rather than the over the top variety and this is the case here. The slashes that Chop Top gives Stretch with that razor of his make me wince, particularly when he gets her in the legs, as well as when Chop Top slightly cuts his own neck. Again, tiny but effective and it makes me wince a lot. All in all, while some don't quite work for me, the majority of the makeup effects in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 are very well done and work well in helping the film establish its over the top tone.

Like the film that spawned it, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 took influence from what was popular in both the country and the popular culture at the time but whereas the original subtly made those influences a part of the fabric of the film (the oil crisis, Watergate, the counter-culture movement, etc.), this film puts them in there in order to satirize and turn them on their heads. As screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson said, if the victims in the original film were hippies, the logical next step would be to have the family prey on yuppies in the day and age that the sequel was made in. To that end, he makes the first two victims of the film, Buzz and Rick the Prick, yuppies in the most unlikable of ways. As I said earlier, these two assholes create havoc on the road with no regard whatsoever to other people's feelings or even safety for that matter and so, although Leatherface slicing Buzz's head open with a chainsaw is a bit of an extreme reaction, the two of them really deserve what ever punishment they get. Furthermore, it's also hilarious to think that Drayton has, unbeknownst to the yuppies, turned them into cannibals by making chili and barbecue out of human victims and then selling it to the residents of the town, making a particularly big profit whenever there's a big sports event coming up, such as the big football game that serves as the film's backdrop, that will draw high-paying tourists. Drayton even dresses like a yuppie when he goes out in public and says that he loves this town because it loves prime meat, which causes everyone to cheer! It's a sick but funny way of commenting on how the rich yuppies devour the common man by buying up everything with their credit cards and only caring about furthering their own livelihoods without thinking about what they're doing to those who are lower on the social ladder. Now they actually are devouring other people and more than likely, they've eaten themselves as well as the common man. And one last footnote: Drayton wins an award for his chili. I rest my case. (It's also sickly funny when the woman yuppie who presents him with the award tastes some of the chili and pulls out of her mouth something that looks like a human tooth, which Drayton says is a very hard peppercorn.)

The film also targeted movies that were extremely popular around that time. Most notably, it went after the teen movies, such as those by John Hughes, that were very popular around that time. Buzz and Rick the Prick fall into this bit of satire as well since they're the only two teenage characters in the entire film and yet, they're the most unlikable characters (to me, even the killers are more likable than those two!) Another aspect is creating a romance, albeit one-sided, between Stretch and Leatherface. However, unlike the romances in a lot of those teen movies, this romance is doomed to fail and Stretch even tells Leatherface that. (It also reminds me of that part in the 1976 King Kong when Dwan tells Kong, "Forget about me. This whole thing just isn't going to work. Can't you see?") And, of course, the film's most popular poster copies that of The Breakfast Club exactly, with the members of the family in the same poses as the kids on that poster. Besides those teen movies, 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 really works because, let's face it, Chop Top does look like an alien, even though he's as far from E.T. as you can get. It's a funny in-verse in that she's doing it out of abject fear and in an attempt to get Chop Top out of the studio as fast as possible rather than how Elliot did it to make E.T. feel comfortable and to make friends with him. You also have to like how Chop Top says how much he loved the recording of him and Leatherface murdering Buzz and Rick the Prick, actually reenacts it with his voice, and then asks, "What was that anyway, the Rambo III soundtrack?" Rambo III hadn't even been made yet but the previous year, Rambo: First Blood Part II had been an enormous hit so 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). Basically, nothing was beyond satirizing to Hooper and Carson here.

Hooper also made something that has often been viewed as subtext in slasher movies literal here. There's been a long-standing opinion that the killers in slasher movies are sexually repressed and frustrated and, therefore, the long bladed weapons that they use are viewed as phallic symbols, substitutes for their impotent private parts that they use to plunge into women. I've personally always felt that was an example of people trying to make something out of nothing. I feel that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Just because something is long and pointed doesn't mean it's supposed to be a penis. And as for the metaphor being that plunge their knives and other bladed weapons into women as a substitute for having sex, what about the fact that men get killed in these movies too? Does that mean that the killers are subconsciously gay as well? Some will argue that they do that to get back at the men who can have sexual experiences where as they can't but they're still plunging the supposed phallic symbols into the men as the women. And let's not forget that in the original Friday the 13th, the film that inspired to all of these movies, the killer was a woman who used bladed weapons to kill both men and women. I know somebody will find a way to make something Freudian out of that but to me, the killers in these movies do what they do not because they're sexually frustrated or repressed but because they're either insane or simply want revenge for some wrong that was done to them. It's a pet peeve of mine when people assign Freudian symbols where I don't think there are supposed to be any. Basically, what I'm saying is that, to me, everything is not sexual and people need to get their minds out of the gutter.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is Tobe Hooper must have 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 where he first becomes enfatuated with her has unmistakable sexual overtones to it. Leatherface turns off the chainsaw, rubs the blade gently against Stretch's leg, and puts the tip of it right up to her crotch. He then proceeds to apparently dry-hump the chainsaw and moan and breathe heavily while doing so. However, I don't see this as Leatherface being sexually frustrated or anything but rather as someone who has never experienced this before and is discovering it for the first time, like an adolescent who feels the first hormonal effects of puberty. Stretch herself even realizes that this is not something that Leatherface is used to and uses it as a way to keep him from killing her, although it ends up sending him into a rage and he proceeds to tear the place to pieces when he doesn't know how to handle these emotions. He makes one final not so subtle gesture with the chainsaw towards Stretch before leaving. To me, that's not subtext but rather something that Hooper definitely wanted you to see and, for the way the Leatherface character is presented her, I think it works. Unfortunately, some have attributed more unnecessary undertones to the movie, like in the moment before that when Leatherface bursts into the room and his chainsaw hits some of the beer cans in the tub that Stretch is sitting in. Some have said that the beer spraying across Stretch's face is like Leatherface just ejaculated given the placement of the chainsaw in proportion to his body and so on. I think that, again, is people trying to put in something that isn't there. Need I remind you that Leatherface hadn't become enfatuated yet and was actually trying to kill her? In other words, all he did was accidentally hit the beer cans with his saw and some of it hit Stretch in the face. That's all. (Granted, Hooper himself may have talked about this in an interview I've never seen or read or on the audio commentary on the DVD and I just forgot about it but this is how I view this stuff.) However, I will say that I do understand the view that Chop Top does get off if he scratches his head plate in just the right spot. Both Hooper and Bill Moseley have mentioned that and I can say that in the pleasure-filled moans and grunts he emits while doing so. All in all, while I realize that I've often been down on Hooper, I do give him credit for taking the proposed subtext for slasher movies and making it literal for all of those analysts in this film.

Just like the original film, the score for the movie was done by Tobe Hooper himself along with another person, in this case Jerry Lambert. Whereas the frightening sound design score of the original emphasized that film's nightmarish quality, the score for this one highlights the out of control, insane tone that's prevalent throughout. The main theme that plays over the opening credits as well as throughout the film is like a cross between Bernard Herrmann's main title theme for Psycho and music for, fittingly enough, a maniacal carnival. It has a creepy sound to it as well as a crazed driving force that propels it. You hear that music over the opening credits and right there, you know you better be prepared for a wild flick. The rest of the music is done in that same tone. While there are other crazy themes throughout the movie, there are also themes that are softer and slower paced, notably the eerie, disturbing theme when Chop Top first appears and when Leatherface skins L.G.'s face off. When Leatherface forces Stretch to wear the skinned face and briefly dances with her, Hooper plays some music that does sound like ballroom music but done in a freaky, disturbing tone. One interesting musical moment happens in the scene where Lefty tests out his large chainsaw on the log outside of the hardware store. I swear that you can hear the creepy clanging and banging noises from the original movie during that bit. It's kind of buried underneath the sound of saw but still, watch that scene again and listen to it closely. I'm pretty sure it is a tiny bit of that original sound design score. Also like the original, the soundtrack has a bunch of songs on it but whereas the songs in the original often acted as an awkward counter-balance to some tense scenes that they were played in, these songs act like the score and highlight the madcap tone of this film. The first thing you hear after the ending credits is a song called Shame On You by Timbuk3 and, like the main theme, it tells you what kind of movie you're in for, with its being played over the footage of 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 go on to say, "Saw.") I know now that L.G. listened to the song Haunted Head by Concrete Blonde, which explains why he randomly sang after getting out of his jeep at that point but I didn't know that for a long time which is why that moment made me go, "What?!" I know there were other songs on the soundtrack that I know I heard, including one by Oingo Boingo, but I'm not sure which one was which in terms of their titles. One that I can comment on is Strange Things Happen by Stewart Copeland, this rather calm 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 on. Despite its rather relaxed sound, though, 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!"

While I do enjoy the film very much, I do think that Cannon Films, the company that produced and distributed the film, prevented it from being even better and they also may have shot themselves in the foot in terms of its box-office reception. As I said earlier, the company, notorious for being cheapskates, took $1 million out of the budget, leaving the filmmakers with only $4.7 million to work with. While that's a whole lot more than the original had, it's still not much. (On a sidenote, 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 Tobe Hooper and company to create a film within a very short period of time since they had already given the film a release date of August 22 that year. Everyone involved with the film said that it was an exercise in spontaneous filmmaking due to the small amount of time that they had. After filming was completed and the filmmakers had their first test screening, the people behind Cannon decided that they didn't like the satirical black comedy that Hooper had made, which, as L.M. Kit Carson said, was an odd reaction since, if they had read the script, they would have known that's what the movie was going for. Furthermore, according to Carson and others, Cannon took the film and made even more cuts to it than had already been made by Hooper and the editor, eliminating other material such as a big family dynamic where Stretch is revealed to be Lefty's illegitimate daughter and whatnot. In other words, they tried to make it more of what they felt it should be rather than what Hooper and his company had tried to create. I don't think that any of this stuff appears in the deleted scenes that you can find on the DVD (I have watched them but it was only once and it was so long ago that I don't remember the specifics) so that means it's either been lost forever or nobody knows where it is now. In other words, we probably never will get to see the film that Hooper intended to create, which is a shame. And, like I said, I think Cannon may have also hurt themselves when it came to actually releasing the film. When the first pass with ratings board resulted in the film receiving an "X," Cannon decided to just release it unrated and while it is cool that it was released with all of the gore intact, that also limits the amount of advertising you can do for a film. Furthermore, while I've only seen the trailer, it's possible that Cannon may have tried to play down how much of a comedy the film is. The theatrical trailer that you always see would you make think it was a serious horror film and while there is the infamous Breakfast Club poster, other posters that I've seen make no reference to the fact that the film is funny. So, Cannon limited how much publicity they could do for the film by releasing it without a rating and most of the publicity they did do touted it as a serious horror film like the original, which led to fans of the original being not too happy when they went to see it and realized it was a black comedy. But, finally, I think another reason for the film's poor box-office performance was that it was a case of too little, too late. It had been twelve years since the original and America, with all of the other horror films that had come along in its wake, had moved on. People lose interest after a long time and, other than the hardcore fans of the original, the mainstream audience probably wasn't in much of a rush to see a sequel to a film that was over a decade old. What ever the case may be, the film only made a little over $8 million which, while not awful considering the film's small budget, was hardly a profit for the studio. Granted, it became a cult favorite on video in the years afterward but, when it was initially released, it wasn't that well thought of by anybody and it still kind of gets some flack from people who love the original.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is definitely a love it or hate it kind of movie. Personally, I like it a lot. It may be really crazy during the latter half but I do think it's a fun, gory, black comedy of a film with memorable characters, good performances, and some nice satire. The only stipulation 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 you want more of the same intense, gritty-feeling that it had, then you'd better look elsewhere because you will not be happy after seeing this movie. But, if you're willing to think of this as a completely different type of movie from the original and enjoy it for what it has to offer, which is a lot, then you'll have fun with it. Basically accept it for what it is or don't watch it all. That's all I can say.