But this reappraisal is largely a case of horror cinephiles missing the forest for the trees-of wanting so badly for a film to be something that they will it to be so, regardless of the evidence in front of them.
And there are memorable flourishes, such as the chase that opens the film, the irrational set design of a radio station, which has a steel door that looks exactly like the one in the dilapidated house from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the entirety of Dennis Hopper’s parodic macho performance.
The film defensively deconstructs itself, encouraging a reading of itself as a satire of 1980s-era excess, of commercialism, sexism, the gun culture, and so on-and audiences have embraced it on these terms over the years. Chop-Top frequently namechecks controversial battles of the Vietnam War while torturing victims, encouraging us to anticipate a metaphor or juxtaposition that never comes into sight. In the sequel, the villains are continually stopping the film cold to tell us what they represent, particularly Chop-Top (Bill Moseley), who’s always picking at the metal plate (with a hot coat hanger, in the film’s best and sickest touch) that’s in his head because of the injuries he sustained during his military service in Vietnam. The first film imparted its classist meanings formally, allowing us to understand the horrible clan at its center as a symbol of the disenfranchised, barely employed portion of the so-called red states, and their prey as hippies who thought they were entitled to go anywhere they damn well pleased.
In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Hooper renders the first film’s countercultural subtext text, congratulating himself for attempting to mount some sort of bloodbath with incoherent Reagan-era resonances. How does one top, match, or even complement thrillers that are so inherently rooted in the shock of the bottom falling out from underneath the characters, and, by extension, us? Hooper immediately and disappointingly sidesteps this concern by staging the second Texas Chainsaw Massacre as a flip comedy, which scans as a way of evading comparison with the visceral legacy of the first film while hypocritically cashing in on its reputation. In theory, the idea of Hooper returning to his most prominent creation at least arouses curiosity, as it’s akin to the possibility of Alfred Hitchcock making a second Psycho. This impression is especially stifling in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. There’s often a sense that Hooper’s making bad films on purpose, deliberately trying to flush his career down the toilet. An aura of contempt lingers over Hooper’s filmography, as if the horror maven resents himself for setting the bar so high on his first outing, damning whatever follows to linger in his masterpiece’s shadows. Where that film is lean and mercilessly precise, much of Hooper’s oeuvre is flabby and self-consciously unconvincing. It’s not that Hooper’s subsequent films are bad, though many of them are it’s that their tediousness represents a pointed 180-degree turn away from Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s ferocious aesthetic. One of the pervading mysteries of the horror genre is the career of filmmaker Tobe Hooper, who directed The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, one of the greatest and most influential of all American movies, only to follow it up with a long string of listless mediocrities.
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