The opening scene of the movie picks up where the original movie left off in the summer of 1974. Sally has escaped the Sawyers' (it took me this film to get the joke there) house of horrors, and the local police, along with every yokel in the state, turn up, where they really would have been of better use say, twelve hours earlier. Inside the house are Leatherface, Gas Station Guy and Grandpa, plus half a dozen other family members never seen before, who surely just turned up if we are to believe anything. Among these is a woman with a baby. A massive torches-and-pitchforks riot ensues, and the locals massacre the Sawyers and steal the baby.
In present day, we meet a hot young thing, Heather (Alexandra Daddario), who finds out her parents 'adopted' her and that she has inherited a massive estate from Grandma Verna Sawyer (Marilyn Burns) in Texas. She and her equally hot and young friends kit up the van and drive on down to Texas where they are met at Heather's new mansion by a lawyer, who gives her the keys and a letter, with strict instructions from the deceased that the letter be read. Too bad Heather's loudmouth tagalongs are preoccupied checking out the new pad, complete with pool table and shit loads of silver plates and candelabras (you know - the kind that belong in a Swag Bag). She forgets the letter, and apparently her common sense, when the suave hitch hiker they picked up (a stark contrast to Edwin Neal's grotesque freak) only a few hours ago is allowed to be left alone in the house while everybody else goes for groceries totally unnecessarily. I mean, send two people at the most. Definitely bring the stranger with you!
Well, the Swag Bag comes out, and said silver plates and candelabras go tumbling in, but Hitch Hiker is too freakin' nosy for his own good. He finds a secret door in the kitchen, which leads him down an eery dark staircase into a creepy basement with burning candles and lots of stuff made of iron. There's yet another door, which he obnoxiously tries to open every which way possible, before ol' Leatherface comes bursting through and rips the guy to a pulp.
The group of idiots return and are soooo shocked to find that they've been burglarised, and that the sexy culprit is gone. Here I should elaborate on the group slightly: we have Heather, and her boyfriend Ryan, her best friend Nikki and other guy Kenny. Heather and Kenny are occupied in the house, and Nikki lures her best friend's boyfriend out to the barn. Earlier at the grocery store, it is alluded to that they had a 'one-time thing' that Heather cannot find out about. Well, don't history repeat itself?! Ryan is hardly resistant, and the two proceed to fuck in the barn.
Meanwhile inside, Kenny also skulks too far and unwittingly forces Leatherface from the basement, and so his rampage begins. Heather finds her thoroughly demolished friend at Leatherface's feet, and starts screaming and running for her life (at least she is sensible enough to run outside), at which point the adulterers come out of the barn to see what's going on. All they see is a menacing silhouette in the darkness, which starts coming at them with a chainsaw. So, of course, they lock the wooden door and stand back. The immediately unlikable tart Nikki grabs a shotgun, and says - here comes the first of several notably terrible lines - "Welcome to Texas, motherfucker," before shooting through the door at their aggressor. Firstly, whoever this motherfucker is, he's probably in a better position to welcome you to Texas, y'old City Kid - you just got here! Secondly, what's with the contrived cockiness? You are being advanced by an unknown chainsaw-wielding psycho, it's perfectly acceptable to be terrified.Well anyhow, after a major plotline like 'cheating boyfriend and best mate' is thrown in, we expect some kind of follow up, right? I mean, Heather has to find out, and comeuppance will arrive. Apparently not. Observe: after some graveyard-related shenanigans, the three remaining friends rendezvous and wisely hit the road. However, male idiot wants to ram the colossal iron gates, because they don't have time to get out and open them, having overtaken their chaser at 50mph on a very long driveway. Female idiots disagree, but hey, he's driving, so smashed-to-shit engine, here we come! Now they are forced to get out and open the gate anyhow, after the obligatory few minutes of stalling and key-turning and aggressor gaining on them, and get a few hundred metres before the whole freakin' vehicle does several spins and is well and truly wiped out. The dickhead boyfriend is killed, the dickhead friend is found hours later twitching in a chest freezer, Pam-style. The secret dies with them and Heather never finds out about their affair. What the hell?!
Leatherface chases Heather to a local funfair, where people are unperturbed to say the least. Despite the vast lengths of open space on every side of her, Heather gets herself not-cornered, and just has to grab onto the rotating ferris wheel and dangle while it turns, inevitably back round to the ground, where Leatherface has strategically moved from one side of the ride platform to the other, saw bared. She escapes with the help of a young copper, who gets her back to the station and she uncovers her real family's case files. Here she realises the locals killed the Sawyers and kidnapped her. So she sneaks out with one of those bullshit 'Murderers' written-in-lipstick statements, to go back to the house. Good idea!
The sheriff sends an officer (yes, that's correct, singular!) to the house to investigate all the murderous goings-on, with the typical opposing force beside him, who wears a different coloured suit and gives the officer stupid instructions with obviously disastrous consequences. The ensuing sequence is by far the film's best and most effective, yet it is the key to the entire plot's undoing. The officer follows the trail of blood into the basement, and in order for his superiors to bear witness to his imminent grizzly death, whips out an iPhone and goes on video call. The granulated picture adds to the creepiness, and it's a brilliant sequence. But wait! iPhones, video calls. This must be set in real present day. Like, 2007 onwards, at the very least. But Heather is very young, about 20 years old. She was a baby in 1974, yet she's 20 in 200-. Wow, that doesn't add up in the slightest.IMDbers have given ridiculous trollish answers to this: They just took the original and set it in the '80s instead; this one is set in the '90s cos my dad says iPhones were around then (never mind the actual video call element); there is never any mention of the opening incident actually taking place in 1974. Alas, there is, and it was, because that's when it was made. You can't take the very same day with all the same events, and just say, "Oh, no - this is 15 years later for no reason." So this is just a glaring chronological error in a movie which was surely produced by professionals intelligent enough to detect such a fault.
Anyhow, it turns out everyone's in on it, even the handsome young cop, and they go out and recapture Heather. There is a cringeworthy scene where she's trapped in the back of the cop car, the handsome cop driving. It has been revealed he's the son of the local tyrannical asshole, and the usually sweet and composed Heather starts pulling all this stary-eyes, weird-turning-of-the-head, psycho-face shit that is just utterly unlike anything we've seen her previously do, and obviously an attempt to look intimidating and insane to her captor. "So you're a Hartman?" she coos at him. She stabs a dagger at the screen between them, and says, "I'm a Sawyer!" Ohh fuck off, seriously! No you're not. You're an average but really hot city girl who came to the state only hours ago on a road trip that went astonishingly awry, who literally just found out that she's related to a family of murderous psychos.
She's dragged off into an abandoned factory full of large and dangerous-looking machinery, and chained with her arms above her head. Needless to say, the goth act is long gone, and she's back to screaming. About time for Leatherface to cut open the large-breasted woman's shirt for no apparent reason. OK, so some pretty amazing boob shots here, but he then notices some birthmark on her chest which advises him that she is his long-lost cousin. With this, he decides not to kill her after all. But what if he hadn't inexplicably ripped her shirt so we could enjoy her massive boobs for a while?
The bad guys come along to kill them both, and when she escapes, Heather goes back again to help Leatherface, who is being beaten rotten, and does so by hurling him his chainsaw (undoubtedly one of the very infrequent shots to be put in 3D to justify there being a 3D version) and yelling (get ready to wince) "Do your thing, cuz!" Ohhh, ohhh the shame! So they kill the bad guys, go back to the blood-spattered mansion and enjoy each other's company. Heather finally reads the letter which tells her about her harmless-really cousin in the basement, and how to look after him. Deciding the maniac who just an hour or two ago murdered her best friends and almost killed her several times is the only real family she has, the movie ends with Heather staying in the death mansion in Texas. What the hell?!So there's your basic run-through of probably the most professionally produced but most laughably amateur installment of the TCM franchise. What is there to say about it that's worthwhile? There are many allusions to the original '74 movie, which itself was amateur but notoriously effective, such as meat hooks, chest freezers and little red short shorts. Our old pal Leatherface, who Hansen first created so devotedly, is portrayed for the sixth time by a sixth actor (this time Dan Yeager), and is emphasised more as an anti-hero who we are supposed to sympathise with. There were definitely moments of real character in the first movie, particularly just after Leatherface has killed Kirk and Pam. He hits things in frustration and sits, head in his hands, obviously upset and confused, as the burning red sunlight seeps through the windows onto him. It's one of an almost constant stream of breath-taking sequences that constitute the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Aside from the aforementioned iPhone scene, there is very little memorable about this movie.
OK, the kills are pretty brutal and leave some bloody big messes. However, one of the most efficacious tricks about the original's making is that no actual violence is ever explicitly shown. We never see the meat hook pierce Pam's flesh, nor do we ever see the trauma caused to Franklin's torso. All we get is the victim's reactions to their own pain. We create the violence in our minds, which is infinitely scarier than any amount of on-screen blood. No such imagination is ignited by this movie. But if nothing else, it periodically reminds us of our own common sense, by recognising its general lack of quality. The picture looks good, but there is negligible thought or creativity exercised. The actors aren't really required to do a convincing job due to the poor and unbelievable script. The dialogue is terribly contrived, decisions were stupid, thought processes abandoned and nothing really fits.As a die-hard Hooper Original fan, I was left thoroughly unsatisfied by this film. The two captivating cameos that lured me to the movie lasted a mere few seconds each. Gunnar's handsome Viking figure, finally unmasked, is on-screen briefly three or four times during the opening shoot out. Marilyn's lovely face eventually graces us minutes from the end, and again, very briefly. Sadly, Marilyn Burns passed away a couple of weeks ago. I would most definitely have preferred some forty-years-later sequel between Leatherface (Hansen) and Sally (Burns), no matter how unnecessary that sounds, in place of this forced trash.
You know what, just as I write this, I have reminded myself of how terrible a film this is, and that I would advise any reader that they would only watch it if they were holding a...Bad Movies Marathon. So I will, in fact, also add this review to my Bad Movies Marathon page too.
End of rant.
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