Use of Tropes: the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

If it had not been for the more obvious tropes used in the Texas Chain Saw Massacre (and that isn’t too obvious) I doubt I would have written this for the blog. Released in 1986 and directed by Tobe Hooper, this was a direct sequel set thirteen years after the first film. Once again it centres on the cannibal Sawyer family – now decamped to an abandoned civil war theme park/carnival and their pursuit by Lefty (Dennis Hopper, Queen of Blood) – a ranger who was the uncle of Sally and Franklin from the first film. Radio DJ Stretch (Caroline Williams) also gets drawn into the story having captured the sound of an attack on tape during a radio call-in.

licking up blood

The details of the film are, mostly, unnecessary from the point of view of looking at the vampiric connection within the film, which centre around the character Grandpa (Ken Evert), who was the focus of the vampiric element of the first film. In the first film I observed that he looked like a corpse but then he seemed almost revived by being fed a drop of blood, to the point of being feebly animate at least. In this he is brought to dinner, again, in a scene that is probably the most derivative of the first film – with him brought to dinner, Stretch tied at the table (replacing Sally), and then trying to encourage him to brain the woman with a hammer to relive his glory days in the slaughterhouse (before he lost his employment to automation).

hammer time

If he looked dead in the first film then he looks no better 13 years on. We hear that he is 137 years old and we get the secret of his longevity when Drayton Sawyer (Jim Siedow) declares “Grandpa's strict liquid diet keeps him as fresh as a rose.” The nature of the liquid is confirmed when he takes a blood coated wire and licks the blood. Whilst he is in a wheelchair, he does wield the hammer. The tool is wielded feebly at first, dropping the hammer as much as failing to hit Stretch, but actually hitting her twice after he tastes the blood, the second time seemingly enough to temporarily incapacitate her. He also manages to stand at one point after that and throw the hammer. The text can be read, of course, that the taste of the blood revived him back to animate action again.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK

Bonus Bit: Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III

I decided to add an addendum re the third film in the series. To me this was thoroughly out with continuity despite having an uncredited appearance of Caroline Williams as Stretch. Not least of all because Leatherface (R. A. Mihailoff) was gutted with a chainsaw in 2 and in the vicinity (along with Grandpa) when a grenade went off. This features a whole new version of the Sawyer family and whilst one might generously imagine it is a new Leatherface, the presence – ish – of Grandpa is the reason why I’m looking at this here.

feeding the corpse blood

And, unlike the other two films, he is dead – rather than looking dead. Sat in the kitchen area of the Sawyer house with blood around the mouth, the family still feed the corpse blood but there is no subsequent movement after being fed. Eventually the corpse is shot, the bullets hitting the torso causing blood to gush due, I assume, to the mummified corpse having blood poured into it regularly causing a reservoir. The face, when hit, collapsing.

Grandpa's bloody corpse

This chapter of the series grossed the lowest at the box office (until the subsequent Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation) and perhaps lost the subversive anti-capitalist undertone of the first two films (In the original Drayton Sawyer has a barbeque shack – selling the human flesh, more explicitly in the second film he wins a chilli cook-off and is obsessed with making money selling his meat products – connecting the family with capitalist pursuits). However, the corpse of grandpa (and its fetishization) made me want to mention the film.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK