Tag: Richard Nixon

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 (1986) ***
I wanted to like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 considerably more than I did, because of the way director Tobe Hooper (1943-2017) and screenwriter Kit Carson (1941-2014) mixed in satire and dark comedy with all the material that seems like a prerequisite for a sequel to only one of the most infamous movies ever made, 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Unfortunately, though, leading lady Caroline Williams’ harried disc jockey Stretch — yes, even women from Texas have names that play right alongside Slim and Tex — spends a good 75 percent of her screen time screaming. Williams screams more than Fay Wray in The Most Dangerous Game and King Kong and Mystery of the Wax Museum combined, more than Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween and The Fog and Prom Night and Terror Train and Halloween II combined, and more than all the heroines combined who have faced Jason and Freddy and Michael over the last couple decades. Williams probably wishes they paid her by the scream.

All that infernal screaming begins to bog Massacre 2 down in the middle stretches of a film that both starts and finishes rather strongly.

Massacre 2 also features a Dennis Hopper performance that rates a distant fourth behind River’s Edge, Blue Velvet, and Hoosiers in the unofficial Hopper-portrays-an-epic-burnout-not-totally-unlike-himself (though, to be fair to Hopper, his Blue Velvet character goes beyond, way beyond, the pale of the normal cinematic psychopath) in 1986 competition.

Since Hopper (1936-2010) portrays former Texas Ranger and Sally and Franklin Hardesty-Enright’s uncle Lt. Boude ‘Lefty’ Enright and Cannon Films released Massacre 2, wouldn’t it have been absolutely fantastic if Cannon action hero Chuck Norris played the ranger pursuing vigilante justice against the ripped, twisted, absolutely positively deranged (not to mention cannibalistic) Sawyer family.

Both Chainsaw movies start with narration and an opening crawl.

The original: The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths, in particular Sally Hardesty and her invalid brother, Franklin. It is all the more tragic in that they were young. But, had they lived very, very long lives, they could not have expected nor would they have wished to see as much of the mad and macabre as they were to see that day. For them an idyllic summer afternoon drive became a nightmare. The events of that day were to lead to the discovery of one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

The sequel: On the afternoon of August 18, 1973, five young people in a Volkswagen van ran out of gas on a farm road in South Texas. Four of them were never seen again. The next morning the one survivor, Sally Hardesty-Enright, was picked up on a roadside, blood-caked and screaming murder. Sally said she had broken out of a window in Hell. The girl babbled a mad tale: a cannibal family in an isolated farmhouse … chainsawed fingers and bones … her brother, her friends hacked up for barbecue … chairs made of human skeletons … Then she sank into catatonia. Texas lawmen mounted a month-long manhunt, but could not locate the macabre farmhouse. They could find no killers and no victims. No facts; no crime. Officially, on the records, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre never happened. But during the last 13 years, over and over again reports of bizarre, grisly chainsaw mass-murders have persisted all across the state of Texas. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has not stopped. It haunts Texas. It seems to have no end.

Made on an estimated $80-140,000 production budget, the original deserves such descriptive phrases as grainy and gritty. Gory, no. Disturbing, yes definitely, terrifying, for sure, with a more than macabre sense of humor, especially during the best dinner table scene this side of Tod Browning’s Freaks. I about lose it every time the family wants the 124-year-old Grandpa Sawyer to end Sally’s life with one crushing blow of a hammer and this cannibalistic codger just can’t find the strength to do it, ultimately giving Sally the opportunity for escape.

More than a decade later, Hooper wanted Massacre 2 to be a dark comedy, accentuating those elements from the original. Meanwhile, naturally, Cannon desired a finished product more along the lines of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or at least its shocking reputation.

The finished product plays more like a compromise.

Both films are reflective of the times they were made. The original, released on the first day of October 1974, came out in the midst of Richard Nixon’s resignation speech, the Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down, the final year of the Vietnam War, the Oil Embargo 1973-74, and general discord in the land. The sequel, released on Aug. 22, 1986, gives us cannibals with ‘family values’ a few months before former Hollywood actor turned politician Ronald Reagan’s speech centered around the family unit and giddy excess in every single frame to produce a bigger but not better Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The original has this insidious way of getting underneath our skin and dominating our thought patterns, and none of the slicker sequels, remakes or imitations even come remotely close to its power to provoke.

NOTE: The parody of The Breakfast Club earns the film’s poster four stars.

Patton (1970)

DAY 79, PATTON

PATTON (1970) Four stars
That darn cat Patton has been wanting me to get around to writing this review all month.

He’s especially been frustrated with his humanoid friend the last couple days. “Will you stop writing about sports long enough to sit down and write on PATTON? Will you do it for me?” He’s been asking such tough questions the last couple days.

I told him, “I worked a 13-hour day Saturday and wrote up over 4,200 words for Tuesday’s paper. I covered a few games in person and I’m dog tired. Then, I stayed up all night Sunday formatting everything into the system and posting it online.”

Patton the Cat did not want to hear such excuses. He said, “Don’t be a candy ass, suck it up Buttercup, and write me a few hundred words on PATTON. It’s where I got my name, you know, of course.” He knows how to bust a fellow’s balls, that’s for sure, that darn cat.

Just in a dirty look, one which he normally directs at the dog.

Alright, I’ll get you that darn review. Sure thing, boss, and I’ll give it everything I got just for you because I know you’ll come over and check out Facebook.

Fortunately, I’ve watched PATTON quite a few times over the years. Many years ago, I would slide the VHS into the player and just sit back and relax for nearly 3 hours. I did that on a regular basis. Sometimes, I would fall to sleep and take a little nap.

On a certain level, I’m a sucker for epics like BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, and even ones of more recent vintage like THE PATRIOT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, for example. There’s just something innately appealing about the form itself. Like a baseball game, you can just lose yourself inside an epic for three hours at a time.

PATTON wisely starts out with a speech based on George S. Patton’s rabble-rouser to the Third Army. Of course, we see an abbreviated and less profane version, but it’s an effective curtain raiser that gets at the heart of the character and how we find this contradictory, larger-than-life character so fascinating despite any objections we might have to this man of war.

“Now, I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

“Men, all this stuff you’ve heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of horse dung. Americans, traditionally, love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle.

“When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big league ball players, the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. Now, I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. Because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.

“Now, an army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, fights as a team. This individuality stuff is a bunch of crap. The bilious bastards who wrote that stuff about individuality for the Saturday Evening Post don’t know anything more about real battle than they do about fornicating.

“Now, we have the finest food and equipment, the best spirit, and the best men in the world. You know, by God, I actually pity those poor bastards we’re going up against. By God, I do. We’re not just going to shoot the bastards. We’re going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We’re going to murder those lousy Hun bastards by the bushel.

“Now, some of you boys, I know, are wondering whether or not you’ll chicken-out under fire. Don’t worry about it. I can assure you that you will all do your duty. The Nazis are the enemy. Wade into them. Spill their blood. Shoot them in the belly. When you put your hand into a bunch of goo that a moment before was your best friend’s face, you’ll know what to do.

“Now there’s another thing I want you to remember. I don’t want to get any messages saying that we are holding our position. We’re not holding anything. Let the Hun do that. We are advancing constantly and we’re not interested in holding onto anything — except the enemy. We’re going to hold onto him by the nose, and we’re gonna kick him in the ass. We’re gonna kick the hell out of him all the time, and we’re gonna go through him like crap through a goose!

“Now, there’s one thing that you men will be able to say when you get back home, and you may thank God for it. Thirty years from now when you’re sitting around your fireside with your grandson on your knee, and he asks you, “What did you do in the great World War II?” — you won’t have to say, “Well, I shoveled shit in Louisiana.”

“Alright now you sons-of-bitches, you know how I feel. Oh, I will be proud to lead you wonderful guys into battle anytime, anywhere. That’s all.”

That speech definitely sets the mood for the rest of the picture, and George C. Scott commands the screen.

Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North’s screenplay effectively plays both sides of the street and director Franklin J. Schaffner (PLANET OF THE APES) helmed a film that can appeal to both hawks and doves, a divide that was especially sharp in 1970 America.

(Or you can simultaneously or alternately be attracted to and repulsed by Patton and PATTON.)

Historical movies undoubtedly say more about the era when they are made, rather than whatever era in time they are depicting.

For example, three events from a turbulent April-May 1970 are tied together.

PATTON premiered on April 2.

Richard Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia on national TV on April 30.

The Kent State shootings happened on May 4 after four days of protest by college students against invading Cambodia.

PATTON was Nixon’s favorite movie.

Philip D. Beidler wrote “Just Like in the Movies: Richard Nixon and Patton,” which appeared in “The Georgia Review” in the fall of 1995.

Beidler’s opening paragraph: “I began this examination of the strange and often dreadful reciprocity between American life and American entertainment—a commemorative essay, one might call it, in several meanings of that term—by adducing two parallel narratives, both essentially factual and both spanning roughly the same period twenty-five years ago. Each began in early April 1970 and ended slightly more than a month later, after the US Army invasion of Cambodia and the killing of four students by Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent State University. The first involves a US president and his obsession with a war movie. The second involves a US Army lieutenant and his experiences in a war being conducted at that time by that president. The president was Richard Nixon. The war movie was PATTON. The army lieutenant was me. The war, of course, was Vietnam.”

I am unable to read past the first page of Biedler’s essay because I do not have a JSTOR account.

Nixon, of course, instantly identified with PATTON and Patton, because I am sure Nixon was aware that he’s one of those people who many folks loved to hate, just like Patton. We have little doubt that PATTON inspired Nixon to get on with Cambodia.

Nixon’s official response to Kent State: “We think we’ve done a rather good job here in Washington in that respect. As you know, we handled the two demonstrations, Oct. 15 and Nov. 15 of last year, without any significant casualties. That took a lot of doing, because there were some rough people who were involved. A few were rough. Most of them were very peaceful.

“I would hope that the experience that we have had in that respect could be shared by the National Guards, which of course are not under Federal control but under state control. … I do know that when you have a situation with a crowd throwing rocks and the National Guard is called in, that there is always a chance that it will escalate into the kind of tragedy that happened at Kent State. … I saw the pictures of those four youngsters in the Evening Star the day after that tragedy. I vowed then that we were going to find methods that would be more effective to deal with these problems of violence, methods that would deal with those who would use force and violence and endanger others, but at the same time would not take the lives of innocent people.”

Kent State inspired Neil Young to write “Ohio” and it was released in June 1970, “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming / We’re finally on our own / This summer I hear the drumming / Four dead in Ohio” and “Gotta get down to it / Soldiers are cutting us down / Should have been done long ago / What if you knew her / And found her dead on the ground / How can you run when you know?”

Young on the song in the liner notes to 1977’s DECADE, “It’s still hard to believe I had to write this song. It’s ironic that I capitalized on the death of these American students. Probably the biggest lesson ever learned at an American place of learning. My best CSNY cut. Recorded totally live in Los Angeles. David Crosby cried after this take.”

And the sad saga pushed Jerry Casale, then a Kent State student, into forming Devo and using “De-evolution” (a.k.a. backward human evolution) as the conceptual framework of the band. Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause, two of the four killed on May 4, were Casale’s friends.

“Until then I was a hippie,” Casale said in a 2005 interview. “I thought that the world is essentially good. If people were evil, there was justice … and that the law mattered. All of those silly naïve things. I saw the depths of the horrors and lies and the evil. The paper that evening, the Akron Beacon Journal, said that students were running around armed and that officers had been hurt. So deputy sheriffs went out and deputized citizens. They drove around with shotguns and there was martial law for 10 days. 7 p.m. curfew. It was open season on the students. We lived in fear. Helicopters surrounding the city with hourly rotating runs out to the West Side and back downtown. All first amendment rights are suspended at the instant the governor gives the order. All of the class-action suits by the parents of the slain students were all dismissed out of court, because once the governor announced martial law, they had no right to assemble.”