“The saw… the saw is family!”

Justin’s rating: I saw this.

Justin’s review: Put yourself in the shoes of director Tobe Hooper. Despite creating one of the most iconic villains and horror movies in 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Hooper had to watch as the entire slasher genre rushed right by him without his creation on board. Freddy, Jason, and Michael were all the rage come the ’80s, but one of the guys who started the trend didn’t get to reap the benefit of that.

And then Hooper got his second shot, thanks to the Cannon Group. He received a chance to make a sequel over a decade later, well after so many slasher franchises had taken root and started to run the concept into the ground. Instead of carrying the tone and vision of the 1974 movie forward — which was probably an impossible ask for audiences in the ’80s — Hooper decided to go absolutely bonkers insane with his concept. Freddy wanted to be quippy? Jason wanted to feature over-the-top kills? Oh, he’d show them all.

He’d show. Them. All.

It’s been 13 years since the Texas Chainsaw Massacre began, and it’s still going strong because Texas law enforcement doesn’t have the best of luck tracking down an entire family full of murderous cannibals. After an impressive sequence where Leatherface chops up a car and its occupants while racing alongside of it on the longest bridge ever built by mankind, the hunt begins anew for this clan.

Texas Marshal Lefty (Dennis Hopper) and radio DJ Stretch (Caroline Williams) make it their mission to discover the truth. They’ll almost certainly regret sticking their noses into this insane clan, but someone’s got to do the dirty work. In any other horror movie, Dennis Hopper would be the villain, but here he’s actually the protagonist — albeit one who is sliding down into insanity as he tracks the killers of his niece and nephew.

Lefty certainly comes off well when we get reacquainted with the Sawyer family. They’re making human meat chili out of their secret headquarters which is located, of all things, at an abandoned amusement park. They’re a nutty bunch, and while Leatherface is the most notorious, there are several others you should really beware. And they are all pretty unhinged in their own unique ways, kind of a grosser League of Doom.

Unlike the first movie, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 adopts a darkly comedic tone coupled with action and cartoonish gore, much in the same vein as Dead Alive, Evil Dead 2, and Phantasm II. Like a couple of those, this one ends with the good guys learning from the chainsaw school of combat. Like none of them, this one ends with the Final Girl being driven insane by her ordeal.

Everything in this sequel is amped way up. Having a whole family of bad guys competing to be the most memorable feels like showing up at a deranged circus where you don’t know whether to laugh or scream.

Apart from a couple good jump-scares, this one isn’t really that scary. It’s absurd, it’s ridiculous, and it’s poking fun at itself as much as the rest of the slasher genre. Heck, Leatherface kind of falls in love with the Final Girl, which makes for awkward encounters and a very uncomfortable dynamic.

After the opening road sequence and a night-time attack at a radio station, the remainder of this movie takes place in the aforementioned amusement park. It’s been co-opted by the Sawyers that have turned it into a macabre fun house. It’s here that Dennis Hopper runs through it with shrieking vengeance and three (!) chainsaws of his own, while the always-screaming Stretch tries to escape what turns out to be a near-endless crazy house of death, Christmas lights, skeletons, meat rooms, and hidden passageways.

Legendary makeup artist Tom Savini was on hand to give this flick his special touch, so you’re not going to be disappointed if you’re looking for memorable visuals. But what I’ll remember is Leatherface’s goofy ape dance that he loves to do before his attacks.

The tongue-in-cheek satire of his own material makes Tobi Hooper a hero in my book. This is the biting kind of humor-horror, bordering on cartoonish while being as ’80s as any scare flick could be. There are a few times where you’ll go, “That is messed UP!” but while chuckling.

The first movie might be a stone-cold classic, but the sequel is far more rewatchable. You’ll never guess where it’s going from minute to minute, and that’s what makes TCM2 such a blast.

Intermission!

• Allegedly, Michael Keaton based his Beetlejuice performance after Chop Top from this film
• A month-long manhunt sounds overly long
• The “Chain… Chain… CHAIN!” theme song
• Texas puts up road signs so people can shoot at them from cars
• Why can’t the radio station hang up on a phone call?
• Dancing Leatherface with Nubbins the corpse
• “It was so wild one of those boys sawed his own head off going 90 miles per hour!”
• The french fry house
• Lefty trying out all of the chainsaws for fighting potential
• Does every car in this movie have a car phone?
• Chop Top likes burning off and eating his scalp
• Mr. Shark
• Leatherface coming out of the record room legit made me jump
• “Nam flashbacks!”
• Stretch likes to scream. A lot. Even at chainsawing sodas.
• Bad guys like to high-five after murder
• TRAP DOOR
• Don’t use skeleton arms to lift people up
• Praying to the chainsaw now, are we
• “Bring it all down!”
• “Peel that pig and slash him thick!”
• Stretch is the worst hider ever
• She’s not having a good day as she’s forced to wear a human face mask
• Nam Land sounds like a pretty bad place
• They still got Franklin in his wheelchair… for some reason
• That endless pull back through the dinner room, what are they, in an airport hanger?
• “I’m the Lord of the Harvest!”
• CHAINSAW DUEL!
• Hey, it’s Mama!