The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

Mad as a box of wasps. That's genuinely the best way I can put it, and I mean it as both a mild compliment and a fair warning. Tobe Hooper's sequel to one of the most genuinely terrifying horror films ever made arrives not as a follow-up but as something closer to a parallel universe fever dream, one where Leatherface and company have been filtered through a blender of black comedy, carnival grotesquerie and sheer, shrieking chaos.

I've written about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre before, and my love for it runs deep. That film is raw and relentless, shot with a documentary grit that makes it feel less like fiction and more like something unearthed from a crime scene. It gets under your skin and stays there. So walking into its sequel expecting anything like that experience is the first mistake you can make. Because this is not that film. Not even close.

What Hooper delivers here is something far noisier, far messier and, in its own deranged way, far more colourful. The oppressive, sun-baked dread of the original is swapped out for neon-drenched excess and a tone that owes as much to splatter comedy as it does to horror. It's the kind of film that makes you genuinely unsure whether you're meant to laugh or wince, and for long stretches you end up doing both at once, probably with your hand half-covering your face.

There are moments of genuine, brilliant madness that I can't help but appreciate. Dennis Hopper turning up with dual chainsaws, playing a vengeful lawman who's clearly lost the plot entirely, is one of those sights that sticks with you simply because you can't quite believe you're watching it. He commits fully, which is either a sign of professionalism or the most gloriously unhinged career decision of the decade, possibly both. And Bill Moseley as Chop-Top is something else entirely. Unhinged in the best possible way, twitchy and unpredictable and deeply, deeply strange. He's the kind of screen presence that makes you lean forward even as every sensible instinct is telling you to look away.

But here's where my feelings get complicated. The shift in tone isn't just bold, it's jarring in ways that don't always work. Where the original built dread through simplicity and suffocation, this one buries you under noise and excess. The horror gets lost in the spectacle. You're rarely frightened. You're often bewildered. Occasionally you're genuinely entertained. But frightened? Almost never. And for a Texas Chainsaw film, that feels like a significant trade-off.

The film shares some of that same gleefully gory spirit you find in something like Re-Animator, that willingness to push the splatter as far as it'll go and then keep pushing. And if you're in the right frame of mind, there's real pleasure in watching a film that absolutely refuses to pump the brakes. But Re-Animator had a tightness of craft beneath all the carnage. Here, the chaos sometimes tips from controlled to genuinely shapeless.

I fall somewhere in the middle with this one, and I'm comfortable admitting that. It's not the film I wanted it to be, but it's also not nothing. It's a genuinely strange piece of work that exists almost entirely on its own terms, indifferent to what the original established and equally indifferent to whether you approve of the swap. Some people love it for exactly that reason. I understand why. I just can't quite get there myself.

Two and a half stars. Worth seeing once, especially if you've got a decent tolerance for pure, headache-inducing weirdness. Just don't go in expecting nightmares. Go in expecting a funhouse with the lights half-broken and someone screaming in the corner, possibly for laughs, possibly not. That's Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 in a nutshell.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 1986  | Watched: 2005-02-02

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Where to watch

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More from Tobe Hooper: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
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