Blu-ray: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) was uniquely disturbing, with its monster Leatherface’s first primal eruption to hang a victim on a meat-hook rivalling Psycho’s murders for shock and fright. It was only as the bludgeoning effect faded on subsequent viewings that the film’s pitch-black comedy became clear.

With a ferocious singularity of mood and purpose bred by its micro-budget, hothouse shoot, it cast a Citizen Kane-like shadow over Hooper’s subsequent career, despite the landmark TV scares of Salem’s Lot (1979) and the smash-hit Poltergeist (1982), which now seems a true collaboration with producer Spielberg’s suburban sensibilities, not the Spielberg film in all but name of industry rumour.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) finished an ill-fated if underrated three-picture deal with Eighties B-movie upstarts Cannon Films, following Invaders from Mars (1985) and Lifeforce (1986). In a 2006 commentary on this double-disc release, Hooper recalls wanting the original’s “ironic dark humour” to “stand out a little more this time”, envisaging a “bizarre twisted comic arena”. It was Dennis Hopper’s follow-up to Blue Velvet and screenwriter Kit Carson’s to co-writing Paris, Texas, but compared to those key Eighties films its surprisingly comic tone was dismissed as a desperate betrayal of the original. Watched free of such expectations, it now seems a complete expression of Hooper’s art. A relatively healthy $15 million budget allowed baroque sets which matched Carson’s daily typewritten rewrites of grisly vernacular absurdism, and a game cast’s slapstick frenzy. “It was up there,” Hooper said of its standing among his work. “I really like this film.”

The first 30 minutes are relatively prosaic, shot flatly outside Austin, Texas by cinematographer Richard Koonis. The highlight is Leatherface’s dispatch of a pair of obnoxious yuppies, emerging from behind the puppet cadaver of another of his cannibal clan during a high-speed car chase. “I am standing up trying to pump blood through the head of a yuppie, which is filled with cat brains,” gore effects maestro Tom Savini memorably commentates. DJ Slim (Caroline Williams) hears the whole thing on a phone-in, and is approached by maverick cowboy cop Lefty (Dennis Hopper, pictured below), who sets her up as bait for the culprits. Hayseed cannibal patriarch Drayton “Cook” Sawyer (Jim Siedow, the sole returning cast-member) meanwhile accepts an award for his secret chili sauce, complete with stray tooth (“Ah, those hard-shell peppercorns…”).

The midnight arrival of Chop Top (Bill Moseley, pictured below left with Williams and Siedow) at the radio station, looking dug up and rotting in its grungy neon glow, is, Williams notes, when the film slips a gear. Carson relishes the diseased hipster raps of a clan-member absent in Vietnam during his family’s previous reign of terror. Leatherface is tasked with killing Stretch while Chop Top hammers her co-worker L.G. (Lou Perry), but is distracted into using his chainsaw as a sort of sex toy, skimming the front of her hot-pants. This perverse beauty and the beast scenario continues when Stretch pursues the killers to their slaughterhouse lair, where Leatherface places L.G.’s skinned face over hers in a spirit of grisly romance. L.G. meanwhile revives, despite extensive butchery.

Hooper and Kim Henkel’s 1974 screenplay portrayed its killers as embittered slaughterhouse workers left redundant by automation and reduced to harvesting human meat. Social comment is replaced by comedy here, with Jim Siedow’s Cook at the exasperated, canny head of his dunderhead psycho clan, and Leatherface the comic butt among these three murderous stooges, all eye-rolls and double-takes behind his skinned-human mask. “It’s a swindle, that’s all - don’t get mixed up in it,” Chef advises, upon observing Leatherface’s sudden interest in sex. “Sex and the Saw,” he adds, summing up life’s choices. “Sex…well, nobody knows. But Saw is family!”

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s clearly comic family dinner scene, with its surviving female victim tethered to be dispatched by a butterfingered, zombified Grandpa, is repeated with Grandpa still somehow extant (“137 years old and still fast as Jesse James!”). The last long sequence sets the family hideout in the real-life Texas Battle Land theme park, an already bizarre place of Davy Crockett statues and eerie iron-ribbed tunnels, dressed by production designer Cary White with Christmas-lit underground dioramas of skeleton victims in deckchairs and a model of Slim Pickens’ bomb-riding Dr Strangelove lunatic. Williams’ performance becomes one long scream and scramble for survival, Carson’s dialogue ripe Texan surreal, and Hooper’s fish-eye lens, big close-ups and deep-focus shots creating action painting cinema akin to Russ Meyer, lit in sickly subterranean, psychedelic yellow and red. We have proceeded through a previously unknown looking-glass way out into a crazed Texas subconscious of meat and mayhem, where Hooper appears blissfully at home.

Commentaries with cast and crew including the excellent Williams (suicidally brave in a shoot nearly as borderline illegal as ’74’s) paint a rich picture of the production. “He loved all that extemporaneous, nutty stuff…it gave him great joy,” it’s said of Hooper’s mood during the shoot. The director’s own commentary is mild-mannered and not given to the theorising of peers such as George A. Romero. It’s easy to imagine him deferring to Spielberg on Poltergeist’s set, and rarely seizing his career’s reins. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 anyway taps deep into his uniquely weird vein.

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