Hopper becomes more or less insane himself along the way, a lawman who chooses the weapon of the maniacs. Called “Texas Battle Land” ,it’s a surreal set that places the madness and mayhem of the Sawyers against the backdrop of American history, suggesting that both are dripping with blood.ĭennis Hopper’s Lieutenant Enright is a former Texas Ranger (a fairly clear reference to the “Lone Ranger”) seeking out the Sawyer family for revenge since he is related to one of the victims from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Meanwhile, the Sawyer family has relocated to a labyrinthine lair beneath the ruins of an abandoned, Frontierland style amusement park that feature horrifying looking statues of historical figures. In Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 the patriarch of the family (simply called “the Cook”) has become a entrepreneur whose business is running a barbeque van in Dallas (“this town loves its meat”) especially aimed at Reagan-era yuppies and frat boys at football games. ![]() ![]() In fact, it fully develops some of Hooper’s ideas from the original and, best of all, gives us an incredibly insane performance by Dennis Hopper that’s not to be missed. Suffering from poor box office returns and in the shadow of its predecessor, it’s easy to overlook it as just another horror sequel. It’s bloodier than the original but the terrors it inspires are less intelligent even as they aim to be more didactic and cerebral.Īnd yet, it’s also a film that deserves second viewing and something of a second chance. The symbolism is less subtext and more overdetermining metaphor. Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, recently released on blu-ray, shares little of the original’s urgent power and never quite succeeds in equaling its aesthetic of tormented American history. ![]() Amidst the animal skulls are human skulls and the frontier décor includes lampshades made of human flesh, the American frontier as Auschwitz, the American dream as a nightmare of brutality, insanity and cannibalism. Former employees of a slaughterhouse that tied them to the American fascination with meat and murder and meat as murder, they lived in a rural fortress that recalled the Jeffersonian homestead and the legacy of frontier heroes like Davy Crockett. His rage at American society seemed more or less confirmed by the malice of the Nixon administration, the reports of American atrocities in Vietnam, and a recalcitrant American silent majority that seemed determined to resist the civil rights movement, second wave feminism and any possibility of the thorough transformation of American society that Hooper’s generation so desperately wanted.Īnd so, in the first of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series, the rural Sawyer family became America. It’s a film probably best understood alongside Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist and Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left as announcements to horror audiences that all bets were off, that seeing one of these movies meant putting yourself in the hands of directors that might show anything to you, that might do anything to you and to your dreams.ĭirector Tobe Hooper brought to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre a deeply cynical view of the American past and present, a distrust of the hoary past and the elders that guarded that past. ![]() The original 1974 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre sounded the tocsin that a new kind of horror had clawed its way into American film.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |