Second Chances: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

SECOND CHANCES

christopher funderburg

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2

Despite their reputations, some films and filmmakers just don't do it for Funderburg and Cribbs. This series, Second Chances, follows their attempts to find greatness where they've previously failed to see it; to actively make an effort to appreciate esteemed artworks for which they currently have a distaste (or feel indifference). They'll give cult favorites like Let the Right One In another shot and dig deep in the filmographies of beloved auteurs whose appeal baffles them (like Nicholas Ray) - and with a little luck, maybe they'll even end up as newly-minted fans...

The subject: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

Initial Resistance:

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is one of the few films I can really recall upsetting me. I saw it when I was teenager and that initial viewing experience is vivid in my memory, if only because it was such a ridiculous setting in which to be terrified: my parent's suburban home, a bright sunny spring day at about one o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. If there is a less terrifying, more benign setting known to existence, I'm not aware of it. I recall getting up off of the beige sofa and pacing back and forth across the off-white carpet as I watched the film, intermittently sitting down and standing back up, deeply unsettled and horrified. The film's ending shocked me most of all - the penultimate image of a bloody Marilyn Burns screaming hysterically provided no catharsis: just a battered, tormented woman narrowly escaping death. And then: a final shot of the chainsaw-wielding transvestite man-child dancing violently in the sunrise. It's not an exaggeration to say that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a horror film like no other, but that clichéd fact is just as easy to over-look.

On the surface of things, TCSM resembles the hordes subsequent films to follow the basic outline of "pot-smoking, scantily-clad youngsters go to a remote area and are violently murdered by depraved lunatics almost supernatural in their awfulness." But down in its core, it's really nothing like those movies - it often gets called the grand-daddy of all slasher films, but anyone with even a mild familiarity with the genre would be able to tell you that Halloween is the platonic ideal to which everything from Friday the 13th to Soroity Row are aspiring. TCSM is an usually cagey and strange film, a pitch-black abyss which viewed from certain angles can reveal counter-cultural satire, dark but still almost screwball-ish comedy or even a dogmatic Artuadian theater of cruelty.* Forty or so minutes in, the narrative drops any pretense of interest in developing the ostensible main character (and kills off the others surprisingly quickly), instead shifting its perspective to the family of carniverous killers - the family takes center stage in the second half and the film provides little relief from the madness and macabre of their world. If anything, it becomes almost a domestic drama centered around the struggles of three under-achieving brothers and their grandpa, a great man now little more than a living corpse buoyed by tales of his former glory. It could easily be re-titled The Death of a Beef Salesman; its focus becoming the domestic minuteae of fixing dinner and coping with the physical trials of caring for an enfeebled relative. The interplay of their familial relationships all but shuttles Marilyn Burns' Sally off-screen - if she weren't constantly shrieking, you might forget she was even there.

The aesthetic of the film is even more idiosyncratic. Daniel Pearl's brilliant cinematography starts off in dusty orange hues and static painterly compositions of Texas vistas before gradually reducing its focus to tight punishing hand-held shots of cramped dark spaces, its jagged disoriented close-ups instantly recalling the psychedelic-tinged experimental films of the 1960's. The images methodically degenerate from Malick to Brakhage, breaking down as the narrative becomes unmoored from a traditional perspective, as our surviving protagonist comes unhinged and is reduced to a position of pure meat, as the everyday depravity of the rural family creeps out in every direction like a disease consuming the film. And while Sally escapes and the hitch-hiking brother is crushed by a truck, the film eschews any standard come-uppance for the murderous villains; the police don't storm their compound, Sally doesn't return with a machete - if the bad guys are stopped from continuing to do what they do, we sure don't see it. And then: a final shot of the chainsaw-wielding transvestite man-child dancing violently in the sunrise.

To tell you the truth, I am frequently convinced that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is the greatest film ever made - I haven't even mentioned Robert A. Burns' legendary production design or the film's two most under-rated elements: Tobe Hooper and Wayne Bell's clattering screeching atonal score or J. Larry Carroll and Sallye Richardson's stunning editing. Granted, I don't place much stock in "Greatest Ever!" pronouncements, but I'm hard pressed to think of a more effective and unique film - it definitely achieves real beauty through real awfulness, which is a tough trick to pull off since the two things naturally undercut each other. I certainly love it and have spent more time thinking, writing and lecturing on it than any other film, so... from the beginning, I was on the fence about its sequel. On the one hand, director Tobe Hooper was returning to the project. Especially in the 1980's, the original director returning for the sequel seemed to be the make-or-break factor. Franchises like Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street suffered for bringing in hired guns while The Evil Dead and Phantasm managed to keep their personalities more or less intact throughout the subsequent outings. Night of the Living Dead's iterations seem to prove this point conclusively (although to classify those films as 80's horror is wrong) - say what you will about Day of the Dead or Land of the Dead, Romero brings to them fealty to the source material (and a unique vision) painfully absent from Tom Savini's more literal 1990 recreation.

On the other hand, The Teaxs Chainsaw Massacre 2 looked nothing like the original - the video box was a campy cheese-ball abomination that seemed to position the now rural maniacs family as the type of goofy horror film hero/villains popularized by late-vintage, pun-obsessed Freddy Kreuger. Look at that poster: something is clearly up. What's with making "Chain Saw" into "Chainsaw?" It goes to show you how finicky I am that I have a lot of affection for the original film's idiosyncratic title spelling and the more technically correct spelling put me on guard. (And I now know that I was right: Michael Bay's terrible remake did the same thing - oh well, at least I have a quick way of telling the original and the shit-bomb apart.) Everything about it looks like the touring company version of the original: both cleanly professional and extremely cheesey. Look at the tagline: "After a decade of silence... the buzzz is back." Really? That's the what the marketing department came up with for an encore to "Who will survive and what will be left of them?" Plus, the little teaser taken from the opening monologue: "America's most bizarre and brutal crimes." It almost doesn't need the excellent capper: "What happened is true. Now the motion picture that's just as real." But what the hell is this new silly cast photo? Who's that guy in front supposed to be? Cousin Roy? Oh, ha, ha, I had missed the buzzz so much and all the good times we shared - I hope my pal Leatherface is back along with the buzzz! Or maybe he's just the physical embodiment of the buzzz. Who knows? The only thing I'm sure of is that a good time will be had by all. So, yeah, I was a little skeptical. I waited until college, probably another 4 years after my unforgettable experience with the original, to check out 2. [how can you fail to mention that this poster is a silly Breakfast Club parody?! - john]

When I finally sat down to watch the sequel, I was well aware that the buzzz on it wasn't very good. Joe Bob Briggs, the greatest champion of TCSM and the critic most important to my teenage self, gave it a lukewarm approval even though he had been given an (ultimately excised) cameo. I hadn't heard or read a good word about it, other than Carol Clover writing in Men, Women and Chainsaws, but she was an avowed horror cinema novice and didn't seem to have much of a discerning taste within the genre, especially when it came to slasher films. The general agreement seemed to be that there was no real reason for it to exist - Hooper just needed it as a cash-grab. He was coming off of his three biggest studio projects: the ultra-succesful Poltergeist (still nowhere near the hit of the original TCSM), the naked space-vampire apocalypse epic Lifeforce and the ambitious remake of Invaders from Mars. Lifeforce and Invaders from Mars were expensive flops and the persistent rumor-mongering sought to re-assign the lion's share of credit for Poltergeist to producer Steven Spielberg, so TCM 2appeared to be a classic sell-out move. That's the way it goes, I guess. I really enjoy that phase of Hooper's career making sloppy big budget weirdness, so technically there are many films I could reasonably expect to enjoy less than 2. My dark secret is that I'm a completist (even more so in my youth) and I will go far out of my way to see obscure films with meagre reputations by directors I like in favor of seeing Important Classics that I know aren't to my tastes.** What sense did it make that I had sought out the excellent "cocktail dress haunted by ancient Aztec spirits" film I'm Dangerous Tonight, but not given the sequel to one of my favorite films a go? I knew in my heart that I would only avoid TCM 2 for so long.

My hopes were lowered and, even then, I hated 2. What surprised me is that I hated it with a fiery passion. Not only was it some completely pointless sell-out dreck, but it was one with a campy tone that almost seemed to be deriding the original. It seemed to belong squarely in the tradition of shitty late-80's horror films that spurted stupid comedy and fake-looking gore in equal amounts. As far as the horror genre is concerned, the comedy and gore in the original are comparatively restrained. In terms of the onscreen violence, there's nothing ground-breaking - it's mainly suggestive. It certainly doesn't contain anything more graphic than Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (made a decade and a half earlier, in 1960) and is far below the level of repulsive sadistic misogynistic violence onscreen in the Master of Suspense's Frenzy (released in 1972, an immediate precursor to TCM.) With the sequel, Hooper went the exact opposite route and created the type of excessive splatterfest which was fairly routine by 1986. It might've gone one step further than anything that previously existed, but only by the small-minded measures of the MPAA (4 mangled limbs, 3 spurts of a severed artery, 2 torn eye-balls, etc.) - philosophically there was nothing to its violence beyond the depressing "more is more!" mentality that had overtaken horror cinema in that timeframe. The amped-up joke-y comedy was an analogous change: what was subtle in the original had been blown completely out of proportion seemingly in imitation of the legions of garbage that had followed in the original's wake. Instead of somehow tapping the spirit of the original, it had instead chosen to ape all the crap that had stolen nothing beyond its general plot and tool-centric violence: it was a rip-off of rip-offs, a cash-in on cash-ins.

Reason for reassessment:

There's no good reason that I wanted to revisit it after a decade. The film's reputation for unalloyed terribleness has waned somewhat, maybe the Platinum Dunes take on the material has given fans a new appreciation for the original films. There's even a significant segment of the horror film community that loves it and holds Bill Moseley's Chop Top (a cut-rate replacement for the original film's hitch-hiker) in the same regard as Leatherface - which is all dubious and, truthfully, the sort of mindset that turns me off from the film. More importantly, other than that I hated it, I couldn't really remember anything about it. I had basically three memories: Chop Top using a heated wire hanger to pick at his metal-plated skull, Dennis Hopper dressed like a bandoleros/gay-cowboy hybrid and Leatherface rubbing his chainsaw in a woman's crotch in the most overboard attempt to literalize subtext I have ever seen. I had a lot of ideas floating around about it being a "rip-off of rip-offs" but no real specific memories of the plot (and what ones I did have proved to be wrong on the second viewing.) Part of me is always searching for my past for errors and intellectual blindspots, wanting to give art I don't like another chance and see if maybe I was in the wrong - and my burning hatred of 2 seemed to be fueled by certain youthful fires that had cooled. I no longer hate bad 80's horror films or see them as a dangerous degradation of something I love: bad movies have always and will always exist, bad art is essentially unrelated to good art. I have no nostalgia for an imagined past in which most of the horror movies from any era aren't terrible (and I don't dream of a future in which the Marcus Nispels of the world will be definitively defeated.) The world simply isn't set up like "Halloween versus Friday the 13th" - if one wins the other loses! Or Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 stinks and that somehow hurts the original film. My views on "selling out" boil to down to, "I no longer think of it as a moral transgression against the sanctity of art, I just sure wish folks wouldn't do it because they're a lot less likely to make something I'll like."

Additionally, I don't hold Tobe Hooper to any kind of a standard: I didn't remember much about 2, but there's almost no way it could be as bad as Night Terrors or Crocodile. Like I said, the Poltergeist, Lifeforce, Invaders from Mars 3-pack is my favorite phase of Hooper's career and 2 probably belongs more to that group than the "cheap, ill-concieved b-flicks" that he's been churning out ever since. For the record, I enjoy The Mangler, Spontaneous Combustion and the aforementioned "cocktail dress haunted by Aztec spirits" tale I'm Dangerous Tonight, but those movies are pure camp: enjoyable for their terrible ill-concieved cheapness. Film like those are dime-a-dozen; the ludicrous big budget 3-pack is a much rarer and formidable vintage of cinematic lunacy. Hopefully, 2 actually belonged to that category (or at least interestingly straddled the line.) That's the truly strange thing about Hooper as a director: he's shown an almost equal capacity for inventive genius and total incompetence. After the really unclassifiable Texas Chain Saw Massacre, he makes a batch of more or less staid, effective (and just slightly weird) films including Funhouse, Salem's Lot and Eaten Alive. Then comes the big-budget Hollywood 3-pack, films that are extravagantly ambitious cinematically, but also deeply, deeply weird. Poltergeist has a similar profile to TCM in that in some ways it follows the haunting/possession film template, but at the same time departs conclusively from the places those other films go - like TCM, it's unforgettable because there's actually nothing else like it. Invaders from Mars is the inverse: a film so by the book, showing so much fidelity to the source mindset/philosophy, that it brings out the extreme psychosis of that original mindset. And Lifeforce is definitely my personal favorite naked space-vampire apocalypse epic. TCSM 2 is the swan song of that Tobe Hooper, the Hollywood hack that for once used the big budgets and Stan Winston special effects to create an unhinged universe of previously unimagined landscapes - hell, I'm talking myself into fandom right now!

* Would you like to read my thesis!

** Here is where I admit to having never seen The Godfather Part 1, only Part 2.

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