Headcheese: A “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” Retrospective — Part Two
The Saw is Family: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) directed by Tobe Hooper and written by L. M. Kit Carson.
“During the last 13 years, over and over again reports of bizarre, grisly chain-saw mass-murders have persisted all over the state of Texas. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has not stopped. It haunts Texas. It seems to have no end.” — Opening narration, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)
“We’re doing a sequel/ That’s what we do in Hollywood/ And everybody knows/ The sequel’s never quite as good” — Muppets Most Wanted (2011)
The slasher sequel is an interesting beast.
When considering the great slashers of the past, their status as franchises is obvious. One can hardly think of a slasher without considering the many films that came after it, the endless Roman numerals splattered in blood. For many, the imagery of sequels will become ubiquitous with the slasher’s name — Jason in his hockey mask is Friday the 13th though Jason doesn’t feature as the primary antagonist until the first sequel, and doesn’t wear the hockey mask until the second sequel. For new arrivals, the sheer volume of sequels to any given slasher can seem daunting, and fans seem to feel essentially two ways about them.
Some fans will furiously decry any sequel as being a blemish on the legacy of the original — their reverence for the original apparently not being such that it can be enjoyed apart from its place in a broader franchise. Other fans will greedily lap up any further instalment they’re given — of course, pooh-poohing some of the troughs but eagerly praising the peaks. Some particularly impressive sequels will even be given that most backhanded of accolades — “the best since the original”.
Well, to my mind, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is the best since the original in this franchise. Hooper conceived of it as a “grim comedy” which upset fans of the first film, who had expected “more of the same” from the sequel. Whilst I touched on the humour of the original film in the last part of this retrospective, this one immediately ups the ante and establishes a tone of balls-to-the-wall anarchism from the opening scene of two obnoxious teenagers running afoul of Leatherface (Bill Johnson, replacing Gunnar Hansen) on the highway. With his chainsaw (what else?) he first cuts up their car, and then the driver’s skull — the bisected head spurting blood is more outright gore than anything in the first film but the tone is very different. If The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was a pitch-black comedy, its sequel can be regarded as more of a live-action cartoon.
As well as the shift in tone, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 also displays an escalation in scale and an expansion of the film’s world. If Leatherface’s highway massacre sounds a bit more proactive than his home turf murders of the first film, he is matched by two go-getting protagonists who pursue him rather than stand around before becoming acquainted with the business end of a chainsaw — radio DJ Stretch (Caroline Williams) and the zealous Lefty Enright (Dennis Hopper), a former Texas Ranger and uncle of the Hardesty siblings of the first film. Both of these will eventually come to wield chainsaws in duels with Leatherface’s family (in this film named the Sawyers [!]) and their relative dynamism largely sets them apart from the victims of the original film, and indeed most slasher protagonists.
Of course, in any Texas Chainsaw Massacre story the real stars are the ghoulish family of cannibals at the centre and this holds especially true for this one. If their eccentricity was unsettling in the first film, in this sequel it is dialled up to the point of wackiness. Leatherface is characterised as almost childlike in the first film but this one can be considered his adolescence, and the growing boy finds himself infatuated with Stretch. These “Beauty and the Beast” scenes are some of the more disturbing the film has to offer — Hooper certainly isn’t shy about belabouring his metaphor of chainsaw as a phallic symbol — and they offer some depth to Leatherface’s character as he finds himself repeatedly unable to kill Stretch. Discomfiting as it is to see a slasher’s lust, Leatherface’s infatuation with Stretch sets him apart from other killers of the time — Jason and Michael remaining faceless, emotionless ciphers: plot devices to deliver kills. Granted, this isn’t a permanent humanising development for Leatherface as the film marches onto its finale. He’s given a birds-and-the-bees talk by his family (“Sex is… well, nobody knows. But the saw… the saw is family”) and remains aligned with them by the time Lefty arrives and engages him in a ridiculous chainsaw duel. And so, Leatherface remains the villainous “heavy” for the Sawyer family when he is killed by a grenade with most of his family, never to return (until the next sequel).
Returning from the first film are the Old Man, now renamed Drayton Sawyer (still played by Jim Siedow), and Grandpa (formerly Grandfather, now played by Ken Everet under the heavy prosthetics). Drayton is no longer the sinister but relatively grounded figure of the first film, now a larger-than-life acclaimed chilli chef and minor celebrity of the chilli cook-off scene. In a great sequence when he wins another prize, he winkingly boasts “I got a real good eye for prime meat” and dismisses a tooth the judge finds in her food as “One of those hard-shelled peppercorns”. It’s just part of the magic of the film and Hooper and Carson’s winking satire of the slasher genre that the family of cannibals have gone undetected for so long. Back at the family home (now reimagined as a abandoned carnival littered with bones rather than the believable Victorian house of the original) he remains the one who calls the shots and sends his brothers out to do his bidding to collect meat or dispose of pesky radio DJs. Grandpa’s role in the film is essentially the same as the first film, as the Final Girl is brought to him for him to try and fail to kill with a hammer — one of the few times the film falls into the sequel trap of becoming a Greatest Hits of the iconic original.
Arguably the best part of the sequel is the new character of Chop-Top (Bill Moseley), a brother of Leatherface and Drayton’s who assists his masked brother in eliminating threats to the Sawyer family. He is somewhat reminiscent of the Hitchhiker from the first film, but is an even more unhinged figure — pasty-faced and wearing a Sonny Bono wig to cover a metal plate in his head from ‘Nam, which he periodically scratches with a coat-hanger so he can nibble on the loose skin. Moseley’s performance is remarkably entertaining, and perfectly balances humour and menace — the greatest scene in the film in my opinion is the sequence in which he arrives at the radio station to menace Stretch into handing over the recording she had of the film’s opening murder. Even before the arrival of his chainsaw wielding brother, the scene is imbued with an escalating dread as he forces Stretch to give him an impromptou tour of the station and then refuses to leave. Even after the deaths of Drayton, Grandpa and Leatherface, Chop-Top remains as the final villain of the film. He pursues Stretch and slashes her with a razor until she eventually stabs him with a chainsaw a few times and knocks him off a mountain — never to be seen again.
All of which is to indicate that one of the great successes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, as with the original film is how it recognises that it is not sustainable for these films to become The Leatherface Show — and they are at their best when he remains only one of the scions of this latter day Sawney Bean clan. The development of Leatherface, the foregrounding of his brothers, the cheerfully wild tone, and the actually entertaining protagonists (dull protagonists being an epidemic in horror films) all serve to make this a perfectly subversive sequel to the original slasher, and the greatest entry in the franchise after the original. Hooper and Carson understood that for a sequel to be a success, you cannot just do the same thing over and over again. It’s a pity that audiences only lately are changing their mind about this film, as its rejection at release and Hooper’s lack of direct involvement going forward is likely why the franchise descended to the depths of banality it reaches at its lowest. But more on that later, next time I’ll be covering the dull Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990) and the baffling odd duck of the odd franchise — Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995).
