The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 arrives from the Cannon Films assembly line as a sequel that treats its predecessor's reputation as raw material for a joke. Tobe Hooper, returning to the material that made him famous, decided the first film had always been a comedy and that audiences simply failed to notice. The result is a chili cookoff, a radio station, a subterranean amusement park decorated with human remains, and Dennis Hopper purchasing chainsaws with the grim intensity of a man shopping for groceries. The satire, such as it is, aims at yuppies, football fans, and local television, which is to say it aims at everyone and commits to nothing.

Caroline Williams plays Stretch, a radio host who survives by charm and nerve and eventually takes up the chainsaw herself. The film hands her the weapon and the closing dance, a gesture that reads as slasher inheritance instead of argument. Her triumph is the genre's oldest promise: the last one standing gets to scream. The cannibal family grinds through a parody of Texas commerce and home cooking, and any reading of the Sawyer clan as a critique of capitalism requires more interpretive charity than the material earns. The chili is people. That is the entire thesis.

The film's real transgressions are visceral. It was released unrated after the MPAA balked, banned in several countries, and trimmed by censors who found the gore intolerable. Its promotional poster parodied The Breakfast Club, which tells us where the filmmakers thought the joke lived. Nothing in the runtime gestures at representation, identity, or the social questions that would define a later era of filmmaking, and there is no sermonizing to be found, only screaming and meat. We classify it accordingly: a grimy, funny, mean-spirited artifact of 1986, guilty of many things, guilty of none of the modern ones.

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel"]}