It wasn't Amazon, but Stan, that I was on Thursday night, as I dug up the sequel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Or, I should say, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, as I have to keep reminding myself it was originally a five-word title.
I actually liked The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 more than I expected to, which does not mean I actually recommend watching it. My 2.5 stars on Letterboxd are, technically, just short of a recommendation. But boy is it a gonzo experience, and that certainly counts for something. The grisly hillbilly vibe of the original is certainly recreated here, with perhaps a skosh more comedy. And Dennis Hopper is nuts.
I don't want to discuss its horror elements, though. I want to discuss its telecommunications elements.
The premise of this movie is an odd one, and it starts from the very beginning.
In a true sign that this movie is more of a comedy than the original, the movie begins on a pair of demented yuppies driving through Texas, shooting at passing signs, attempting to force ordinary Texans off the road through games of chicken. You can tell they are demented yuppies because they drive a BMW and because they have a car phone. (They were not called "cell phones" in 1986 -- you could not use them outside the car, so they were car phones.) Also, one of them is wearing these neon glasses that appear to give him a second set of eyes.
Their eventual encounter with the chainsaw family is characterized by the first of a few times in the movie I felt a genuine sense of horror. Leatherface appears on the flatbed of a pickup truck, whose driver is somehow able to drive just as fast backward as the yuppies drive forward. He looks even scarier than usual because he's got either a dead person, or convincing depiction of a dead person, fastened to his front, so it looks kind of like a zombie or a ghoul is wielding the saw at the yuppies.
But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.
One of the ways the yuppies raise hell is to call a request line of a local radio station, to engage in further trolling more than to actually request a song. And their trolling is pretty effective, because they immediately turn the DJ -- Vanita "Stretch" Brock (Caroline Williams), who becomes our protagonist -- into their prisoner.
See, for some reason, Stretch lacks the ability to disconnect their phone call. In a bizarre scenario that could possibly reflect the realities of the time, though I can't imagine how that would be, she relies on the yuppies to hang up their phone to free up her line. If they don't hang up, she can't use the line again for any other reason. So she, a DJ who is due back on the air any moment, cannot prevent two asshole idiots from hijacking her phone line, and is left repeatedly asking them to hang up.
At first this just struck me as totally unlikely, the laziest kind of plot convenience. (It's a "convenience" because it ultimately allows her to witness the yuppies being chainsawed to death.) But now that I'm thinking about it, is that how phones really worked back then? I can't recall which, but I seem to remember some other movie where a character pleads with another character to hang up the phone.
It's funny what we forget the longer we move away from a certain period of time. I was 12 and 13 in 1986, so this is well within the range of my memory. It seems hard to believe that phone calls were ever a social contract reliant on mutual cooperation. Could a prank caller really call you up and tie up your phone line just by refusing to hang up theirs? Could that really have been?
Maybe when phones were first introduced as a method of communication, I could see this as a necessary evil subject to the limits of the technology. But as recently as 1986? Maybe I'm back to thinking it was B.S. I actually made prank phone calls myself around then, and if I'd known it was possible to tie up someone's line with my own, it's probably something I would have done.
Because the radio station records calls in order to play them on the air at their pleasure, Stretch has a recording of the yuppies being killed, and the crashing of their car does eventually sever the connection. The use of this recording is even more bizarre, and now enter Dennis Hopper.
Hopper plays a police officer who lost family members in the story of the original movie. Stretch brings him the recording as evidence of what happened, but he's in a drunken stupor and basically dismisses her. However, he later finds her again and tells her she needs to play the recording of the yuppies screaming and being dismembered on air.
What???
Apparently this is his tactic to draw out the chainsaw family. His bizarre assumption is that they will be listening to the radio station at exactly the time the snuff recording is played, and that ... what? They will come forward? They will attack the radio station? And if she has to play the recording more than once to make sure they hear it, you'd figure the station would really start to lose their regular listeners, who are probably not that big on listening to the sounds of people being chainsawed to death. Even if they are asshole yuppies.
Of course, it does work. One member of the chainsaw family calls another in time for him to pick up his own car phone -- how many people had car phones in 1986? -- and still hear the clip while it's going on. How long do people really scream when they are being chainsawed to death in a moving car? At least a minute, it would seem. (I believe the screams are actually of the passenger witnessing his driver getting a section of his skull sawed off.)
And then of course they do attack the radio station, which sets the subsequent mayhem in motion.
A thing I was really glad to get from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 was some explicit gore. That's something I really haven't found in the movies I've watched so far this October. I watched another horror movie from the 1980s -- Prom Night -- last weekend, under the mistaken belief it might contain some. But that movie was just total cheese and not the least bit satisfying.
I was satisfied by the gore in this one, if not the telecommunications.
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