Which Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies are worth watching?

Tobe Hooper’s 1974 horror movieTexas Chain Saw MassacreBeautiful in it’s singularity. While it’s often lumped among its grindhouse peers and slasher brethren, very little of it is actually comparable to the rest of its genre. This is still sun-scorched madness. A handful of young adults are thrown into the rabbit hole to hell by a face-wearing behemoth with his insane family, who live in a decayed farmhouse.

The movie doesn’t have much plot structure, and you can divide it into the half where the lead, Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns), isn’t screaming a lot, and the half where she is. The cackling cannibals who commit the titular slayings complain about gas prices, gentrification, and their own displacement in a society that’s leaving them behind, rendering them as ultimately human, but nonetheless ghoulish. And by the end of it, audiences are left thinking exactly what Sally does as she laughs hysterically in the back of a fleeing truck while Leatherface, stymied, swings his chainsaw in the middle of the road: “What the hell just happened?”

It is difficult to imagine a sequel because the first film was so unique. Any look into not just the film, but its behind-the-scenes chaos, seems to indicate that no one can replicate it, even though duplication and returns to form are often horror’s gory ethos. That hasn’t stopped filmmakers from trying, with the most recent attempt, Netflix’s direct sequel Texas Chainsaw MassacreThe latest example is. But unlike the usual horror sequels, which usually just ratchet up the body count and confuse the canon, 1974’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre It is unique. The sequels to this horror standout don’t just feel like attempts to copy the original’s success, they feel like fumbling efforts to figure out why it worked in the first place — duplication by means of psychoanalyzation. As each sequel has pulled out a thread of the original and tried to make that the entire fabric of the piece, they’ve each made a different argument for what’s important in the first film.

Foto: New Line Cinema

Hooper directed the 1986 sequel. Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2.. At that time, his budget had increased from the very modest amount of the original film to an even larger allowance from Cannon Films. They are purveyors and distributors of violence, camps, and explosions. Hooper’s aim with the film was pure black comedy and buckets of blood, as if even he knew he wouldn’t be able to top himself. He felt that audiences at the time didn’t really get the humor of the original film, so Part 2It is wie a sledgehammer on the skull. The political commentary amplifies to make it a Reagan-era parody.

1990’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III: Leatherface New Line Cinema distributed the film, which was then well-known for its studio. A Nightmare on Elm Street. Dubbed “The House that Freddy Built,” New Line was intent on reversing the tone of Hooper’s 1986 sequel Finding the most easily reproducible elements and audiences-friendly parts from the original film was the goal. Finding the heart and soul of the film was our clear goal. Texas Chainsaw Massacre This time, Jeff Burr is the journeyman director and this was to turn it into a horror franchise staple. But squabbles with the MPAA over the 1990 film’s violence and its rating ended up neutering its potential, and not even a leering performance by a young Viggo Mortensen and a hilariously goofy trailer based off ExcaliburCould save it. Hooper was a consummate entertainer in the original movie. This version is a little more subdued. Chainsaw It was clear that there wasn’t a mold, regardless of how Burr tried to distill the story down into its core slasher elements.

1995’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Return is the closest the series has gotten to reigniting the original film’s unpredictability. It has a truly wild third-act twist, and it features a sweaty, manic “Oh my God, he’s in this?” performance by Matthew McConaughey. Its closeness to the original is understandable — it was written and directed by the first film’s co-writer, Kim Henkel, and his film is full of Illuminati experiments and borderline self-parody, as victims “experience horror on the pretext that it produces some kind of transcendent experience.” Retour dissects the first film’s chaos by providing conspiracy structure, lacing cabal-esque reason into delirium, and ignoring the way the fear in the original film was birthed from the fact that it seemingly came from nowhere.

Foto: New Line Cinema

2003’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre begins not just with voiceover from the narrator of the original film’s opening scrawl, John Larroquette, but with copious faux documentary footage. It takes the original’s lurid “What happened is true.” tagline to its logical extent and uses it to give the project something more like a true-crime vibe. It filters the original’s cinéma vérité style through a series of biographical checkpoints, figuring that if the original seemed real to people, what would happen if it This was real? Would you be interested in learning how Leatherface created his masks? Imagine being able to learn that Leatherface was bullied in his youth. How about Scott Kosar, the screenwriter and Marcus Nispel recognized his whole family instead of just four odd dudes who live in an apartment with a grandmother’s corpse?

2006’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning serves as a prequel to the 2003 remake, which feels like destiny, given the 2003 version’s massive box office. Leatherface loses an arm and is left unable to use wood-cutting machines in the sequel. The movie answers questions that no one had about the original. It opens with Leatherface’s birth in a meat plant and ends with him picking up his chainsaw like a divine Providence. It drops the dull green and brown color palette of the 2003 version in favor of a bleached, dusty yellow-and-orange look that’s more friendly to the original film, as if it was the look of the 1974 movie that made it a hit. But it’s still a history-book approach to a series best left without one, another attempt to lean on the “truth” behind the characters.

2013’s Texas Chainsaw 3DThis was the second attempt to make a sequel to the movie. It was released forty years later and featured a lot of nostalgia. The first scene is based on scenes from the movie and takes place in the farmhouse that will soon be destroyed. It is a tribute to the film of 1974 that guides everything. However, it doesn’t add anything frightening. At the end, the heroine and Leatherface are even revealed to be cousins, and they team up, retooling the masked killer’s vicious tendencies as a neighborly quirk. It misjudges Leatherface as a bit of American iconography rather than an object of terror — the cinematic equivalent of Charles Manson T-shirt.

2017’s Leatherface It is a prequel that links to the original movie. Texas Chainsaw 3DLeatherface was now seen as one of few escapees out of an insane asylum. As the directors of 2003’s remake and the prequel film, this team decided that Leatherface was the heartbeat of their story. Instead of giving broad answers, the team focuses on specific traumas and injuries that led to Leatherface becoming a psychopath. Once again, it’s an approach that plumbs the depths of what it would take for the story to be “real,” boiling the nightmare of the original into true-crime-esque cause-and-effect.

Foto: New Line Cinema

With Netflix’s 2022 Texas Chainsaw Massacre, director David Blue Garcia and the writers are obviously enamored with the original movie’s political themes, particularly the early-’70s economic recession that forced Leatherface’s family into destitution. With a few young social activists looking to improve the town Leatherface is now living in, Leatherface’s family chooses to dine on New Age hippies. The film’s messages are mixed by making some survivors heroes and Leatherface a victim of circumstance. These attempts to capture the power and inspiration of the original film are a failure. Even though it’s more indebted to the original film than any movie in the franchise has been for almost 30 years, the creators don’t trust in the original’s efficacy.

What are you waiting for? DoesMake Texas Chain Saw Massacre work? Are there unsolvable problems or is it difficult to remake the film? Hollywood won’t be able to answer these questions. The endless horror-movie process of rebooting and and trying to re-create success is almost always doomed, because it’s trying to attribute complicated chemistry to something very simple. It’s impossible to reproduce originality while remaining original. So this franchise, like so many others, keeps crashing against the rocks of a movie that’s become horror legend precisely because it wasn’t slavishly copying a specific past film. It is evident in how each of these movies try to extract its guts and study them before creating a new creature. The buzzing of the chainsaw is not going to stop, whether it’s good or bad.

Photo by Yana Blajeva/Legendary via Netflix

Which Texas Chainsaw MassacreFilms are well worth the effort.

MUST SEE: Texas Chain Saw Massacre It’s both an iconic and refreshingly modern piece of cinema. Every horror fan and barbecue lover should see it. It’s available on Shudder.

MUST WATCH Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2.The second best series episode, a darkly comical and over-the-top comedy that is also the most memorable. It introduces the character of Chop Top, played by future Rob Zombie movie staple Bill Moseley, and he’s likely the most quotable thing to ever come out of the series. Dennis Hopper also has a duel for the chainsaw with Leatherface. Rad. It’s available on Apple iTunes.

MAYBE: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III: Leatherface isn’t as unforgiving or bizarre as the first two, but if you’re open to a Chainsaw It’s a film that is more like other horror movies of the time. You should give it a chance. Dawn of the Dead’s Ken Foree stars. It’s available for rent on Amazon Video.

MAYBE: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is Back“, aka Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation is widely regarded as “the bad one,” and it’s far from perfect. However, it is quite entertaining watching Matthew McConaughey shouting over a dimly lit kitchen table, while Leatherface sobs, screams, and curses at the television. Its last act has to be seen. It’s on HBO Max.

MAYBE: Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2003 remake is like many remakes from the ’00s — overproduced, with an over-reliance on the monster’s backstory. But it’s generally well-directed, and R. Lee Ermey (the abusive gunnery sergeant from Full Metal Jacket) plays a perverse sheriff in a role that’s the most hauntingly effective thing in any modern Chainsaw film. It’s on Netflix.

MAYBE: Texas Chainsaw Massacre: It’s the BeginningIt is excellent if the original was well received, however it could have used more bloodshed or more examples of unrestrained cruelty. They are delivered. Ermey, once again, is an outstanding choice, adding a nauseating backbone and a compelling story to the often unnecessary origin story. It’s also on Netflix.

SKIP: Texas Chainsaw 3D can’t really be recommended in good conscience. If you’re morbidly curious to see a Leatherface film where the triumphant line is “Do your thing, cuz!” it’s available on Peacock.

MAYBE: Leatherface doesn’t really need to exist, but out of all of the Chainsaw Films other than the two above, the narrative idea of this film is what seems most daring. The most stripped down of the films outside of the first, it’s on Pluto TV.

MAYBE:The 2022 Texas Chainsaw Massacre It tries to use some of the same tools that were used in the inventions. Halloween The film also features the survivor from the first movie returning to his role as a hunter with an obsession for revenge. It doesn’t really succeed, but it’s gory enough to be satisfying in spite of all of the missed throws it makes. It’s worth waiting for the end. It’s on Netflix.