It’s Halloween soon, and also it was Friday the 13th the other day, so I think it’s only natural to discuss Texas Chainsaw. Leatherface made a good impression on me at FrightFest a couple of months ago, and I went in unsure what to expect; the horror sequel machine churns out a lot of garbage on the one hand; on the other, Lionsgate made the ballsy move of hiring the two guys behind Inside, the brutal home-invasion thriller from the French neo-extreme movement. So it could have gone either way really, but I was pleased with the end result, which was well-characterised, nicely paced, well-shot, unpredictable and nasty in the right places. What it’s not, though, is a Texas Chainsaw movie, at least not a stereotypical one. Instead, it belongs to the long line of twisted romantic crime drama road Westerns. You know the ones: Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, Wild at Heart, True Romance, Natural Born Killers and The Devil’s Rejects, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2; where TCM2 took on a divisive comedic tone, Leatherface plays things straight and doesn’t really get going with all the familiar imagery and tropes until pretty near its end.
I’d call that a good thing; the last three films in this ignoble franchise have been so samey you might have trouble telling them apart. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was the remake of the original, and spawned all the other classic horror remakes, all of which were pretty hard to tell apart from one another. Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning was a prequel to the remake. It was also superior, but that isn’t saying much. Texas Chainsaw 3D was a direct sequel to the 1974 original, establishing a new and humdrum continuity in which Leatherface also takes place. Those three films are incredibly similar, not just tonally and structurally, but also in terms of plot developments. All three feature corrupt sheriffs, twisted matriarchs, Vietnam trauma and Southern Gothic-style melodrama. Curiously, as much as these pictures try their darnedest to be nothing but formulaic Chainsaws, none of these are features present in the original.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is still, to my mind, one of the most astonishing films ever made. It’s famous for its brutality (which has been greatly exaggerated) and its relentless energy (which hasn’t), but I think what’s often overlooked about it is the eerie, off-kilter atmosphere which you can’t really find anywhere else in cinema before or since. Night of the Living Dead maybe comes close with its intense nightmare logic, as does the obscure Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood. But neither are quite so unforgettable, surreal or haunting (they also both predate Texas Chain Saw Massacre). I have a hard time defining what exactly makes it such a unique picture. I think part of it has to do with how beautifully shot it is for such a nasty, downbeat film, part of it has to do with its mostly-daytime setting (note every sequel takes place mostly at conventional nighttime), part of it with how minimalist its storytelling is; it really recreates the quality of a nightmare in a way few films can be said to. Ultimately, it’s just a picture that’s more the sum of its parts, a lightning-in-a-bottle type of thing that came out of the collaboration between director Tobe Hooper and co-writer Kim Henkel, neither of whom went on to replicate their success here (Hooper did helm some other horror classics, like Salem’s Lot and Poltergeist, but both are successes on a considerably more conventional level). There’s a certain tension created by Hooper’s hazy, head-film atmosphere (his debut, Eggshells, was thoroughly hippie and “head”) with the apocalyptic imagery Henkel inserts. It’s like a bad trip, the real death of the 60s.
The horror classics of roughly the same era aren’t the same at all; Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street and Hellraiser are all great films, and Friday the 13th is a movie too, but these are all harmless fun, ghost-train movies that spawned sequels sticking more-or-less exactly to formula. The first batch of Chainsaw sequels, the ones that came out prior to the remake, nobly each try their own thing, each redefining in turn what the series was really all about. First Hooper made a reluctant return to the series with 1986’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, sending-up his own previous work, killing off the entire cannibal clan, and giving us the series’ first corrupt lawman in Dennis Hopper’s (awesome) Lefty Enright, who unlike later lawmen is not portrayed as being just as bad if not worse than the murderers he pursues. Many of the elements first introduced here would be picked up on by later instalments, even as they ignored its events. Those elements include the appropriate family name, Sawyer, not mentioned in the original.
New Line then acquired the rights to the series and made an attempt to turn it into a Friday the 13th-style moneyspinner with Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III. Despite the number in the title, the only acknowledgement it gives to the second film’s events is a brief and ambiguous acknowledgement in its opening subtitle. Making the movie’s name further misleading, Leatherface doesn’t really earn the top-billing the title gives him. Presumably the intent was to make him a bankable icon like Freddy, Jason or Pinhead (neither of the latter two were the main villain in the first film of their series, either). While he’s the only family member to feature in every film of the series, he’s not a main concern in any of them, acting instead as more of a henchman or attack dog for the main villains, with TCMIII being no exception. In the first film, that main villain is probably the Hitchhiker; in the second film, it’s the Hitchhiker’s twin brother Chop Top, played by horror legend Bill Moseley. Here, it’s Viggo Mortensen as Tex Sawyer, an unaccountably handsome scion of the inbred Sawyers. The film does feature a few reasonably effective chase sequences and some enjoyably unhinged doomed teens who make a change from the usual flat slasher characters. But, while it may be more enjoyably executed than most, TCMIII is nonetheless a formulaic slasher.
When Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III failed to ignite the franchise “buzz” New Line had hoped for, they gave the series back to its old co-creator, Kim Henkel, for one of the oddest horror sequels ever filmed. Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, filmed under the moronic title of The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, once again ignores continuity, with another surprisingly good-looking young man, played by Matthew McConaughey with a screwy robotic leg, leading the clan, whose family name is now Slaughter (ridiculous). It’s all pretty generic until the finale, which reveals that the Slaughter clan are employed by the Illuminati, who run the government, planned the JFK assassination, and were apparently responsible for the events of the film. Apparently, true terror leads to spiritual enlightenment, but in this case it turned out horrible*. The Illuminati’s representative Rothman, who may not be human, rescues final girl Renée Zellweger and apologises for the horrible experience he put her through. Henkel was apparently interested in further exploring the conspiracy-theory symbolism he wove so subtly into the first movie, but this may be taking things a bit far. If it’s intended as meta-commentary, the only discernible message is “Sorry this film turned out a bit shit”. It languished on a shelf for two years until Columbia cashed in on the sudden stardom of McConaughey and Zellweger by finally releasing it, causing a minor stir when McConaughey’s camp attempted to prevent its release, not unreasonably fearing embarassment by the association.
And after that point, we got three generic Chainsaws and then Leatherface. While Leatherface avoids pandering by paying homage to every famous moment of the original, it still mixes ideas from all of its predecessors into its formula. As is so often the case with these long-running film franchises, it feels like a kind of Pop Cultural Osmosis has gone on, whereby the formula becomes a bastardised version of the original, supplemented with small parts and ideas from each of its successors. But Leatherface actually tries to do something new with that formula. In that respect it reminded me of Psycho II, which might be the most commendable sequel ever made, and it similarly managed to work a mystery that familiarity with the original didn’t give away; it’s not until the film’s final act that we’re sure which of our main characters is actually going to grow up to become Leatherface. If directors Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo are to be believed, they even toyed with making a female character become Leatherface, which would retroactively have made the Leatherface of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Texas Chainsaw 3D female also. Now that’s daring.
*Says Henkel: “Of course, it does produce a transcendent experience. Death is like that. But no good comes of it. You’re tortured and tormented, and get the crap scared out of you, and then you die”. Er, yeah.
Fact, Conjecture, & Occasional Jokes 