The House Next Door

Chaw's piece is blistering and funny, as usual. For further thoughts on Chainsaw 2, check out Edward Copeland's celebration, published August 26 of this year, 20 years to the day after its original theatrical release.

"When you hear people talk about those rare instances when a movie sequel turns out to be better than its predecessor," Copeland writes, "the usual titles spring up: Aliens, The Godfather Part II, The Bride of Frankenstein, the original Dawn of the Dead, etc. However, there is one sequel that I feel has been unjustly neglected for its superiority to the original and today I come to praise it. Twenty years ago today, Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 hit theaters to the resounding thud of overwhelmingly negative reviews by people who probably remembered the original a lot more fondly than they should have and didn't recognize the sequel for the hilarious, albeit grotesque, satire that it is. This isn't just your run-of-the-mill followup to a famous slasher film -- this is a sharply written parody about the perils of the small businessman, who in this case happens to make his living by turning humans into chili."

Pardon, but I just had to single out this Chaw observation, a keeper and then some:

"It feels like the twelve years separating source and sequel (just like the ten that separate the first two George Romero Dead movies) mark director Tobe Hooper as a sharp sociologist when painting with this very specific brush, evolving the tumor of the Vietnam War manifested as a pair of lumpen bogeys on a young girl's back into this florid bloodbath erected on those conservative tent poles of mass media, mass consumerism, and misguided phallic projection. No accident, either, one supposes, that its central avenging angel is a dim-witted, swaggering cowboy figure, ambling in from the 1950s to win fights we've already lost."

Well, I sorta kinda hated Walter Chaw’s piece. He’s on terra semi-firma when he’s talking about the actual movie, but the rest is full of lazy, muddy thinking. All that commentary on the Reagan era stuff feels lame. It’s like somebody nowadays calling Network “prescient”. That was a fresh observation 30 years ago, but it’s been said so much it’s tired. And why Chaw’s bitterness about the decade he grew up in? “The fantasia, the nostalgia, the delusions of grandeur, the inflationary monomania, and, finally, the decay of actual values in a society believing itself to be the illusory City on the Hill.” Isn’t that most decades? Give me a break! There he goes again, complaining about decaying values. You would have a better case with me if you argued that the 80’s were the decade of suspenders, leg-warmers, and synthesizer music.

How exactly are two lumpen bogeys on a young girl’s back a manifestation of Vietnam? “The transformation from a provincial/rural haunt to a subterranean one speaks to a transition in the culture under scrutiny from one that equates forgetfulness with its fringes to one that pushes its shadow to the subconscious.” That sentence makes less sense every time I reread it. And when Chaw uses the words “permissiveness” and “permissive”, I cease to understand what they mean. Is it good or bad? Why and in what context? This style of writing has become a kind of sleep-walking short hand; people can nod in agreement and never have to wake up.

All movies reflect their periods, period. Texas Chainsaw 2 is a trashy horror flick with some good, crude laughs. But many critics are so in need to brandish their socio-political insights that they will do all kinds of work digging up the tiniest seedlings of an implied metaphor, and carry them a hundred miles to show them off. In Chaw’s case, the seedlings sound like he’s repeating something from rote memory. That’s this man’s opinion.

Well, speaking as somebody who's been known to ride a metaphor till it keels over, I liked the piece, but that's also just one man's opion.

In regard to your main point: Yeah, Chaw might be stretching, but then again he might not be. Tobe Hooper is of that 60s-70s generation of horror directors that used Grand Guignol for purposes of oblique social commentary. I think it is significant that the events of Saw 1 are revisited in the sequel as straight-up satirical farce, which fits the time gap Chaw mentions -- by 1986, sixties values had been elbowed out of the mainstream of American thought and were viewed with nostalgia or disdain; as Ed Copeland's piece nicely observes, the movie is a horror comedy with emphasis on the latter, unabashedly a goof on Reagan era received wisdom, and not too shy about letting you know that. I think Chaw's right to ID the Hopper character as a demented, R. Crumb-style stand in for Reagan. Politically, that reading won't please everyone -- making any character stand for Reagan is a cliche by now, and arguably was a cliche then, too -- but culturally it does track (for me at least). It's not subtle, but it's something more than you get from a typical splatter picture of that era.

I do love the image of digging up seedlings of meaning and carrying them hundreds of miles to show them off, though.