Part of a three picture deal with the now-defunct Cannon Group, Tobe Hooper’s THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 was released unrated in the USA to enable it to play as it was meant to, but in the UK the film didn’t get a release until 2001.
Thirteen years after the events of the first film, the killing of two youths in a car on a bridge brings obsessive sheriff Lefty Enright (Dennis Hopper, EASY RIDER) to the scene. Enright has been tracking incidents like this, simply because he was related to two of the victims from the 1974 classic. Help comes in the form of DJ Stretch (Caroline Williams) who was speaking to the two victims live on air as the incident happened.
Intrigued, Enright gets Stretch to play the recording live on air to try and weed the undesirables out into the open – and sure enough, two of them turn up at the radio station in the form of Leatherface (Bill Johnson) and Chop-Top (Bill Moseley). Chop-Top attacks and wounds Stretch’s engineer, whilst Leatherface develops a romantic attachment to Stretch with a chainsaw in hand…..
This is probably one of the most far-out horror sequels ever and if you can’t stomach the extreme gore and horror effects (courtesy of make-up legend Tom Savini (DAWN OF THE DEAD, FRIDAY THE 13TH), well this might not be the film for you.
However, if you look deeper, you get a sense of the satire underneath, in a film that sliced through the under-belly of Southern State Yuppie-ism thanks to L.M. Kit Carson’s screenplay (he also wrote the classic Wim Wenders film PARIS, TEXAS, starring Nastassja Kinski and Harry Dean Stanton)
Time has been a little more kind to this sequel, which is still one of the most underrated of the horror genre.