Tag: River’s Edge

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.

Class of 1984 (1982)

CLASS OF 1984

CLASS OF 1984 (1982) Three-and-a-half stars

Given its exploitation film content including gore, nudity, profanity, sex, and violence, CLASS OF 1984 will not be shown to new teachers or substitute teachers any school year soon.

Not that it should, but a little independent research never hurt anybody.

I don’t remember, though, if I first watched CLASS OF 1984 during or after my three years as substitute teacher in the late 00s. However, I do remember that it made a strong impact with its story of how an idealistic music teacher eventually gives into the dark side and murders his most unruly students at an inner city high school. It’s definitely the movie to see after DANGEROUS MINDS, LEAN ON ME, all that feel good uplifting claptrap.

Watching CLASS OF 1984 again in a decade since I substituted, it still brings on memories of the little punks who threatened violence, who said they would sue, who just ran their mouths incessantly, and who made getting through another day feel like an endurance contest from Hell. For every good student, it often seemed like there were two or three or twenty bad ones in every class. “I would love to punch you in the face,” one junior high student said. “Go ahead, give it your best shot,” the substitute teacher said. Thankfully, not every day substitute teaching was quite like that.

In that spirit, though, we return to our regularly scheduled review of CLASS OF 1984.

Be warned: This is a rough little movie, a nasty piece of work at times, but if you can make it through scenes like the biology teacher’s murdered rabbits and the rape of the music teacher’s wife, this 1982 update on the 1955 classic BLACKBOARD JUNGLE does have its merits.

The performances help lift this film above mere exploitation trash: Perry King as the music teacher, Roddy McDowall as the biology teacher, Timothy Van Patten as every teacher’s worst nightmare, and Michael J. Fox (in an early role) as one of the good students.

King makes for a likable protagonist and takes us from one end of the picture to the next. We are behind him every step of the way, and that’s critical during the film’s violent final act as enough has become more than enough for this music teacher. Those damn punks go too far, far enough for at least a couple exploitation films. Roger Ebert called the climax a cross between THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME and BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS.

McDowall (1928-98) had a knack for supporting performances that almost steal a movie away from their nominal stars, and he displays that knack here in CLASS OF 1984, especially when he cracks and teaches his biology class by gunpoint. I bet you’ll remember how many chambers are in the human heart with a gun pointed at you, and I also bet that Richard Kiley (from BLACKBOARD JUNGLE) wishes he could have got a scene like that after the punks in his film had their way with his favorite jazz records. Damn kids, damn punks.

[Review resumed about two weeks later.]

To work properly, this genre requires a repugnant piece of work going up against the hero and Van Patten certainly provides that as teenage antagonist Peter Stegman. Audiences have been known to cheer his demise. Stegman’s personality profile on Villains Wiki, “A totally violent, sadistic, ruthless and mentally unstable teenager. He will hurt anyone who he thinks is threatening his authority over the school, or he will also kill them with no remorse or regrets.” In a different movie, Stegman’s piano-playing ability would have been exploited for a different kind of feel-good ending, not one where you feel good the bastard’s dead.

You can see why Fox became a superstar, even in a supporting performance.

CLASS OF 1984 director Mark L. Lester also directed TRUCK STOP WOMEN, WHITE HOUSE MADNESS, BOBBIE JO AND THE OUTLAW, GOLD OF THE AMAZON WOMEN, ROLLER BOOGIE, FIRESTARTER, and COMMANDO. Now, that’s some filmography and I’ll say that it’s close (real close) between CLASS OF 1984 and COMMANDO for his best work.

A movie like this needs a proper soundtrack.

Nearly two decades before AMERICAN GRAFFITI, BLACKBOARD JUNGLE made waves with its use of Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock.” What an opener!

Alice Cooper provides “I Am the Future” for CLASS OF 1984. Mr. Cooper has the ideal credentials for scoring a teenage rebellion pic: specifically “I’m Eighteen,” “School’s Out,” and “Teenage Lament ‘74” from his glory days. As far as mid-period solo Alice standards go, “I Am the Future” does not quite measure up against 1980’s “Clones” and 1983’s “I Love America,” but it still far surpasses Alice’s late 80s and early 90s hair metal period.

CLASS OF 1984 belongs to a branch of entertainment that includes such notables as not only BLACKBOARD JUNGLE but also BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, OVER THE EDGE, ROCK ‘N’ ROLL HIGH SCHOOL, RIVER’S EDGE, and PUMP UP THE VOLUME, as well as the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video.