Prime Video Unleashes Unhinged Sequel to a Devastating 1970s Horror Classic
There is no touching The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. You can’t replicate the madness and pure cosmic terror that Tobe Hooper evoked with his 1974 classic, though many have tried. It’s a bolt of lightning, a solar flare that’ll only take that shape one time, and it should be treasured. Prime Video seems to get what I mean.
Perhaps that’s why the Texas Chainsaw franchise has been a story of diminishing returns for so many fans, because nothing could ever be what that original film was again. The trick, at least for me, is in looking at each of the successive films as exercises in playing in the same sandbox, using the tools of Hooper’s mayhem more than the actual spirit. That’s true of all of the sequels, but it’s particularly true in the only sequel that Hooper himself directed, and one of my favorite sequels of all time, now back on streaming for all to see.
Released more than a decade after the original film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 returns to the same Texas landscape of the original, chronicling yet another encounter with Leatherface and his demented family as they terrorize a radio DJ (Caroline Williams) and a former lawman (Dennis Hopper) out for revenge. It grows the family by introducing the iconic Chop Top (Bill Moseley), and even gives them a new layer in the form of a real abandoned amusement in the heart of the Lone Star State.
For a Texan like me, there’s simply a lot of to love about the film’s portrayal of the contradictions and shadows of my home state, from two kids who are murdered on their way to a Texas-Oklahoma college football matchup (The Red River Rivalry, it’s a big deal down here) to its jokes about chili cook-offs. But there’s more to it than that, and it has to do with the pure anarchic energy that Hooper revives with a completely different aesthetic.
By this point in his career, Hooper had made yet more brutal rural horror (Eaten Alive), another demented slasher (The Funhouse), and even gone fully mainstream with Poltergeist. While he’d picked up more filmmaking tools and techniques along the way, he never quite lost that sense of the frantic that thrums through the original Texas Chain Saw Part 2 retains that and then pushes it further through lighting and music and kills that feel so amplified and overwhelming that they border on cartoonish. It’s a very different experience from the original film, but it’s built on the same foundation, and like that first film, it’ll still drop your jaw.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is on Prime Video now, so go check out one of my favorite horror sequels, and one of the best opening kills in any slasher.
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