She Never Died (yes, SHE!)

She Never Died (2019)

Dir. Audrey Cummings

Written by Jason Krawczyk

Starring Olunike Adeliyi, Peter MacNeill, Kiana Madeira, Noah Dalton Danby, Michelle Nolden

I was genuinely surprised when I saw they made a sequel to HE NEVER DIED, the Henry-Rollins-starring cannibal/action/horror/drama/comedy that so unexpectedly delighted me back when I randomly caught it in 2015 during the AFI Spooky Movie Festival. Not that I wouldn’t be up for spending more time with Jack, the immortal, perpetually put-upon bingo enthusiast played by Rollins, but it just seemed like the first film wrapped up so neatly that it didn’t demand any further exploration. It was the first film I’d seen in ages to premise itself upon a J.J. Abrams-style mystery box and then actually have the goods to pay off that mystery with an interesting, satisfying solution – but in doing so, it didn’t seem to leave a sequel with much room for a similar mystery hook. Still, the possibility of kicking around for a sequel adventure with Rollins’ hilariously deadpan weirdo seemed appealing enough – which makes it doubly surprising that he isn’t in it! The fact that this “sequel” even takes place in the same universe as HE NEVER DIED is attested to only obliquely. If it didn’t have that title, I’m genuinely not sure even people who had seen HE NEVER DIED would have put together that this was a sequel, and, in fact, a sequel with some pretty serious and ballsy implications for a franchise.

First things first, though: although it will eventually expand the mythology somewhat, SHE NEVER DIED is primarily one of those genre sequels which is essentially a remake and remix of the first one, like EVIL DEAD 2 or FROM DUSK TIL DAWN 3, or SECOND TO LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST or FRIDAY THE 13th Parts 2, 3, 4, 6, and 7, and to a lesser but still obvious extent also 5 and 8. Just like HE NEVER DIED, SHE NEVER DIED introduces us to an isolated, socially awkward weirdo who, uh, never died. But, as the title might suggest, it is not the same isolated, socially awkward weirdo, but instead a woman named Lacey (Olunike Adelivi, a surprisingly lengthy filmography including SAW: THE FINAL CHAPTER, THE PRODIGY, and UNDERCOVER BROTHER [uncredited]) who is living as a homeless derelict and moonlighting as a brutal vigilante who stalks the members of a human trafficking ring led by an absolutely magnificent douche named Terrance (a superbly entertaining Noah Dalton Danby, another surprisingly lengthy filmography including DETROIT ROCK CITY, RIDDICK, and EXIT WOUNDS [!]).

If her actions seem very slightly more proactive than Jack’s did, however, her personality is even more reserved. If Jack was utterly disinterested in the world, Lacey seems downright disengaged from it. She has a flat affect and glazed eyes, seems to be completely lost in her own mind, barely even aware of anything around her. When someone talks to her, it seems to take a conscious effort for her to drag herself out of her own thoughts and focus on the speaker. She comes off, in fact, as mildly autistic, not just annoyed by the unwanted intrusion of other humans’ problems --like Jack was-- but genuinely uncomprehending of them. If Jack has isolated himself in a hermetic routine, she has isolated herself within her own mind. Which makes it all the more startling when something finally jars her out of her stupor, and she suddenly roars into a focused, predatory frenzy that is likely to be fatal for anyone around her.

This makes her a harder character to relate to than her irascible, eccentric counterpart in the prequel. Consequently, the movie adopts a slightly different structure from its predecessor, framing the film mostly from the perspective of the other characters who are reacting to Lacey, keeping her at a mysterious distance. Thus, we are introduced to Detective Godfrey (Peter MacNeill, yet another startlingly lengthy filmography, including CRASH [the David Cronenberg one], A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, REGRESSION) an old police veteran who is worrisomely close to retirement but would really love to finally nail the shadowy syndicate which has been kidnapping people and forcing them into brutal snuff films for a live internet audience. When Lacey crashes one of these films and provides an appropriately gory end for the filmmakers, she winds up on the radar of both the Godfrey and the gang, and things get even more complicated after she's joined by an unlikely sidekick, bubbly chatterbox Suzzie (Kiana Madeira, still another busy filmography, most notably an episode of The Flash) who she unintentionally rescued from a gristly death.

The details may be different, but when you get down to it this sounds like little more than a few cosmetic alterations to HE NEVER DIED; again, you have two acolytes, one chipper and persistent, the other disbelieving but curious, who gravitate to our Never Dyer du jour, while meanwhile an obtuse crime plot plays out in the background and provides some antagonists. But it turns out that even gently adjusting the levels of these elements produces a rather startlingly different effect. Despite a functionally identical plot, SHE feels much more like an ensemble piece than HE did, adopting the point-of-view of multiple different characters as they gradually figure out what Lacey is and consider what they want from her. Refocusing the movie this way is kind of a risky move, given the extent to which HE hung together entirely on Rollins’ great character work and inimitable personality. Fortunately, everybody here turns out to be more than up to the task; I didn’t recognize a single face, but, as you have seen, it turns out the cast is absolutely stacked with venerable Canadian character actors, and all those dozens of cheapie American genre flicks and TV shows that shot there to save money have provided this demographic with enough experience that they’re uniformly ready for their big showcase roles here.

 That they have good material to work with certainly helps; writer Jason Krawczyk brings the same offbeat wit he brought last time around. The characters are broad, but distinct and fun, quippy in that most rare of ways which doesn’t seem derivative of Tarantino or tediously labored. Director Audrey Cummings (DARKEN, TORMENTED), stepping in for Krawczyk while he supposedly develops this as a mini-series(?), manages the tone very nicely, giving the actors plenty of room to play up their colorful characters without allowing things to drift into frivolous, low-stakes comedy. Instead, it has the loose, scrappy energy of a 90's indie caper, chatty and maybe a little more self-consciously offbeat than is entirely good for it, but blessedly free of the relentless high-concept plottiness of the current cinematic era. You could definitely show this along with SUICIDE KINGS and THE BIG HIT and, aside from a few inconspicuous bits of technology, never guess it was made twenty years later. Not that it's in any way a pastiche; it's just a good vibe for this material. Not plotless, but less focused on plot than on hanging around with a bunch of colorful weirdos.

That was true of HE NEVER DIED too, of course, but the emphasis on the ensemble here highlights it even more. In particular, it’s worth pointing out what a tremendous improvement the villains are this time, with Danby creating a sleazeball character who is both utterly loathsome and terrifically entertaining. It turns out his boss is his yuppie sister (Michelle Nolden, CHRISTMAS HORROR STORY, HAUNTER, RED, THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE) who moonlights as a sadistic gang leader in-between yoga classes, and who is, if perhaps just a little more cartoonish than the other characters, at least a delightfully hissable villain, and a great foil for our homeless African-American Canadian protagonist. Their flippant, vain villainy got big laughs from my audience (and hopefully gets these actors some bigger parts down the line) but without sacrificing genuine menace or tempting us to identify with them, a subtly tough tone to get right.

 It’s also worth noting the mercifully understated portent of having a homeless black woman fight smug, bourgeois human traffickers; race is never explicitly an issue, but it's hard to ignore the the implications here, especially when they capture Lacey and put her in chains. That uncomfortable image smartly and quietly prompts us to consider a little bit about Lacey’s experience as an immortal. Being an ageless supernatural entity is hard enough on its own (or so I've learned from the endless parade of sad Draculas), but imagine trying it as a female minority! One of the funniest scenes in HE NEVER DIED found Jack offering a comically long list of jobs he’s had over the centuries. He does not describe a life of luxury (it’s a mostly blue-collar resume), but one can’t help but notice there’s no parallel scene for Lacey. It makes me think of Louis CK’s routine* “Time Travel is a White Privilege." Jack may have been miserable, but at least he had options. Black people have had a pretty bad run for a few centuries, especially in the Americas. And being a woman has made things harder pretty much everywhere, since forever. No wonder she seems obliquely unwilling to pay much attention to the world.

This is all left unsaid (to the movie’s enormous benefit); there's only a light suggestion of how enormously alone and beleaguered Lacey must feel, and the movie's focus is squarely on being a feisty, colorful horror/crime flick. Still, there's a unmistakable shadow of philosophical pathos in here, which makes the more familiar joys of supernatural violence hit a little harder. HE NEVER DIED did a magnificent job with this, and Cummings manages that tone at least as well as Krawczyk did, although she doesn’t do much to improve on his cheap-looking, rather style-less aesthetic. No matter; the content is entertaining enough that a simple, unflashy point-and-shoot style gets the job done, making the most of the gritty urban decay of the Canadian locations. In fact, I kind of love that these movies about ageless supernatural beings both take place in bland, run-down Canadian suburbs. I can’t find out specifically where SHE NEVER DIED was shot, but while its predecessor was supposedly shot in Toronto, it’s obviously not the part of Toronto that usually plays New York City. Both movies have a small-time, suburban outskirts feel to them, full of rotting industrial buildings and decaying, dirty strip malls. Nothing towering and gothic, just a drably dismal landscape of slow, dispirited neglect. Even the despicable villains are hardly plotting global domination from the penthouse of Trump Tower; their viciousness and greed looks like it just barely puts them in the upper middle class. They still spend most of their time working in grungy, unfurnished concrete buildings and hustling for new prospects. They can afford to buy off the local cops, but one gets the feeling a federal investigation would have no trouble locking these small-timers up and throwing away the key, if they ever bothered. The small scale keeps things personal, lets the movie focus on its characters rather than getting caught up in a bunch of complex, overwrought plotting about the fate of humanity.

 This all adds up to a charming little genre hybrid peppered with great moments,  though admittedly one which is functionally similar enough to its predecessor that it could hardly be called essential (despite a little extra action and gore, much appreciated). It would be hard to follow HE NEVER DIED in any case, but there's no denying that this feels a little less impactful, lacking its predecessor's element of surprise and failing to find a similarly potent substitute for the utter perfection of Rollins' take on a very similar character. It's a lot of fun, but even by the worthy standards of horror sequels which are essentially remakes, it feels a little bit safe and familiar, unable or unwilling to escalate things or expand the world.

Or, so I thought, until the movie ended, and then I realized it hadn’t quite ended yet. There's a little teaser of a coda at the end, and one so brazenly provocative that it retroactively forgives a lot of the film's general reluctance to break new ground. I wondered how Krawczyk though he was going to turn his simple little story about an eccentric immortal into a series; well, now I guess I have an idea. Whatever comes next seems like it's gonna be pretty wild. Still, SHE NEVER DIED is perfectly convincing proof that this series' ongoing existence needn't be contingent on ambitious narrative conceits. If the pleasures of watching a brusque, indestructible cannibal disinterestedly massacring small-time Canadian gangsters are simple ones, they at least remain reliable. If GENDER-NONBINARY-PRONOUN NEVER DIED does nothing but swap in another weirdo character actor and let them go to town on some local hoods, I'll still probably enjoy the hell out of that too, as long as it can maintain this level of shaggy, offbeat fun. Still, the ending here makes me excited about the possibility that there are still some pretty wild places for this concept to go.

  

* The fact that this reference has some baggage of its own now is telling in its own right.

               

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	Everyone Has Their Demons. Pretty generic, and doesn't even seem to make sense with the movie because there are, I notice, no demons in it.
TITLE ACCURACY	Confirmed, the titular "she" does not die at any point.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	Yes, to 2015's HE NEVER DIED
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA/ Canada
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Sort of vaguely vampire/cannibal, but it kinda defies genre.
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	None, which is probably just as well given its grim subject matter. As it is, the movie is able to stay agreeably light even in the face of villains who run a snuff-film ring; getting sleazy about it might have pushed things into more unpleasant territory.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	None
CREEPY DOLLS?	None.
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Yes, via the live-stream murder viewers
MORAL OF THE STORY	Canada's way more intense than you think.

Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III

Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw III (1990)

Dir. Jeff Burr

Written by David J. Schow

Starring Kate Hodge, William Butler, Ken Foree, Viggo Mortensen, R. A. Milhailoff

            Rummaging through obscure old genre movies is like prospecting for hidden treasure; you can set yourself up in a likely spot, you can search as much ground as possible to increase your odds, but in the end, you still have to get lucky. There’s no substitute for luck. Every once in awhile, you turn up a pretty good one (THE NEST), sometimes you get something useless but singular enough to be interesting (THE AMERICAN SCREAM) and mostly you just get disappointing nothings (THE BLOODYJUDGE). This is especially true for old horror movies, since horror fans are among the least discriminating people on planet Earth and also watch 500% more movies than normal humans. Consequently if there’s anything worthwhile there, it’s usually been discovered long ago. So not only is the prize you seek already exceedingly rare, you’re covering terrain which has already been thoroughly traversed and minutely prospected by fellow travelers. Sometimes, then, your best hope is not that the gold you’re panning for is so obscure as to have never before been seen, but that is has been widely seen, but somehow missed and overlooked, misjudged, misunderstood.

This can happen sometimes; occasionally, a film just happens to be wrong for its time; it’s roundly criticized and dismissed in the moment, only to be rediscovered a generation later with the benefit of time and distance to help the world see subtler charms which were missed by contemporary eyes that expected something else. This is an especially likely fate for offbeat cult genre movies that have even a hint of marquee appeal -- something that draws an audience with disastrously erroneous expectations upon its release, and can never overcome the initial negativity generated by the shock and revulsion that follows from the wrong eyes seeing something they were never meant to see. We talked about this phenomenon back when we discussed Nic Roeg’s EUREKA, a nutty, impressionistic art movie with the gall to try to lure in the normies by casting Gene Hackman and fraudulently passing itself off as some kind of whodunnit.* Some poor suburban dad with a vague memory of liking THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE is not gonna get the fun night at the movies he was hoping for.

Obviously nobody who gets hustled that way is going to come away happy, and generating such universal ill-will so early in a movie’s life is often sufficient to drive away the very people who should see it, dooming a film to immediate and unexamined obscurity. This is obviously a bad PR strategy for the movie in question, but it’s the perfect method of preserving a time capsule for future generations to discover --the cinematic equivalent of getting a mosquito caught in amber-- because it’s one of the few ways to bury a movie so deep and ignominiously that even connoisseurs will fail to unearth it for decades to come. Heck, even Tobe Hooper’s insane TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 suffered a little from this fate; turning his bleak, grueling horror classic into a outrageous campy comedy was not what fans of the first film were expecting in 1986, and you can still find people even today who dismiss it offhand (most have not seen it recently, or they’d have changed their minds). My point is, these things are out there, ready to be recovered, reevaluated, and burnished to their original glory in the eyes of the world.

Alas, LEATHERFACE: TEXAS CHAINSAW III is not such a film.  

Anyway, I can’t say they didn’t warn me. Nobody has ever claimed that LEATHERFACE; TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE III was any damn good at all, and if even 1% of humans were capable of enjoying it, I’d have heard from one of them by now. But even so, I dunno, you look at it on paper and think come on, it’s got fucking Viggo Mortensen and Ken Foree, and the absolute greatest fucking trailer in film history how could this not be at least a little entertaining? And here’s the thing: it is a little entertaining. But here’s also the thing: it’s only a little entertaining. It’s not even some kind of EXORCIST 2 style ambitious wrongheaded hubrisical catastrophe, it’s just the most milquetoast final product you could possibly imagine having the words “Chainsaw massacre” in its title. Or even “Texas,” for that matter. It’s mostly not bad, it’s mostly just nothing. Which unfortunately is just about the most unforgivable sin a movie with “Chainsaw Massacre” in its title could possible commit.

It’s not utterly bereft of merit, however; especially early on, there seems like there might be some hope. After a pretty middling re-introduction to Leatherface (now portrayed by R. A. Milhailoff, a former pro-wrestler and one time Full House guest star) and his penchant for bludgeoning young women and wearing their faces, we meet our ostensible protagonists, Michelle (Kate Hodge, THE HIDDEN II) and Ryan (William Butler, FRIDAY THE 13th PART VII: THE NEW BLOOD, writer of THE GINGERDEAD MAN), who the film treats with the exact maximum possible level of resigned acceptance at the necessity of having a couple of victims in a script. But we also waste little time getting to the obligatory TCSM pervy weirdos, first the handsome and apparently harmless Tex (Viggo Mortensen, RENNY HARLIN’S PRISON), and then the less appealing Bible-fixated peeping-tom Alfredo (Tom Everett, a career which has taken him from DEATH WISH 4: THE CRACKDOWN to THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON**).

These early scenes don’t really work, but they do vaguely hint at why you might imagine director Jeff Burr (STEPFATHER II, PUMPKINHEAD 2: BLOOD WINGS, PUPPETMASTER 4, PUPPETMASTER 5, THE WEREWOLF REBORN!) would not be the worst choice in the world for a TEXAS CHAINSAW movie. Or at least, they might, if you’d seen what appears to be his one and only watchable horror movie, 1987’s FROM A WHISPER TO A SCREAM, a surprising and disquieting anthology film long on uneasy atmosphere and Southern Gothic flavor. The original TCSM and its sequel are more geek show than Flannery O’Connor, but one could dimly imagine Burr recapturing that timeless, stagnating sense of baking sun and decaying sanity and successfully applying it to the debauched world of the Sawyer clan. And in fact, it sounds like that might have been exactly what he intended to do; he wanted to shoot in 16mm, in Texas, and to make it as twisted and grimy as possible.

 But, as you can read in this career-spanningand dream-crushing interview, he had good intentions often, but never the clout to actually make them a reality. In this case, he was hired on at the last minute, with the script already in place, the set already built in California, and a premier date already announced, and that was that. It would not be shot in 16mm, would not be shot in Texas, and would not contain any twist or grime that could feasibly be avoided. New Line, fresh off the underwhelming NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET  5: THE DREAM CHILD and hoping to replace their flagging horror property with a new franchise, would be calling the shots, and, as Burr points out, the final product of that kind of corporate thinking could only be a corporate movie. Which LEATHERFACE indisputably is, and which is the one thing a TEXAS CHAINSAW movie must indisputably never be. It smacks of a film made by responsible, sane people who are just trying to show the kids a good time, and consequently it is irrecoverably hobbled right from the gate. It’s about as perverse and shocking as a Disneyland ride.

So instead of a continuation of the maggot-brained intensity of Tobe Hooper’s two TCSM movies, instead we get a movie which looks and feels like a pretty generic low-budget slasher which would be shot in California and lazily rip off THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. And as far as that genre goes, it’s by no means the worst; I mean, it looks like it was shot by professionals, there’s some production value in there, a couple attempts at some gimmicks. Leatherface drives a jacked up monster truck covered with human skin, for example, which is about as deeply stupid as movies get, but the kind of stupid that’s at least trying to be fun. He also gets a tricked-out chainsaw with the words “The Saw is Family” engraved on the side, which I’m just now realizing is probably a play on “The Sawyer Family,” which is actually kind of funny. Ken Fornee shows up as some kind of survivalist militia guy, I guess, which explains why he has the weapons and wherewithal to actually do battle with the offending backwoods people-eaters. And in the movie’s most interesting idea, they introduce a cute little daughter for the family, who uses a desiccated baby corpse as a doll and gets spoiled and doted on by the older maniacs who are trying to murder up some dinner. Obvious, perhaps, but pleasingly grotesque.

That stuff by itself seems like it should be more than enough to add up to a movie, and yet it somehow doesn’t ever quite seem to make the impact it should. Part of that, no doubt, is the squeamishness of the MPAA, which in the late 80s and early 90s was uniquely merciless to horror films. Consequently, the biggest massacre anywhere in sight is what the MPAA did to it, cutting it to absolute ribbons in order to dodge an unreleasable “X” rating. They might’ve just as well used a chainsaw. Certainly what they did to the film was vastly more brutal than anything the characters ever do on-screen. Numerous shots, and even whole scenes, furtively cut away before anything really awful can happen, deftly refuting any halfhearted claims the film might float to bolster its dubious titular claims. That’s partially a result of the dozens of re-edits, of course; supposedly the film was re-submitted a record 11 times before it got its “R” rating, which would be a badge of honor except that the final product is so mild-mannered. But it’s also just that the movie was kind of a pussycat to begin with. All those cuts definitely didn’t help, but it’s not like it began as an extreme, brutal film only to have all the gore cut out in post; it was always going to be a pretty inoffensive movie, made with with the looming specter of a ratings challenge in mind. And then the MPAA gutted even that. There’s a couple additional moments of blood in the “unrated” cut I saw, but nothing even remotely shocking.*** Even the deleted original ending is barely more nihilistic than a given episode of The Twilight Zone, and not a squib more violent, either.****

So while it would be easy to pin the wholesale failure of the movie on its tortured crucible of ratings-hunting, I can’t really do it. There’s something else missing here. After all, the original TCSM isn’t fundamentally some kind of wall-to-wall gorefest either -- the sequence here wherein our heroine has her hands nailed to a chair and then rips them free is easily as explicitly violent as anything that happens in the original (irony noted: Hooper also tried to avoid explicit violence in the hopes of getting a safer rating -- in his case, an unrealistic PG instead of an R). So it’s not really the violence that’s missing, it’s something more ineffable. It’s the sense of sleaze, of sun-baked dirt and sweat, of decay, of impenetrable, incomprehensible, almost Lovecraftian madness. Hell, it’s the Texas. You miss the Texas. Even inside the Sawyer house, there’s not a frame of this movie that doesn’t have California written on it. And a rather cheap, perfunctory sort of California, at that. Burr and cinematographer James L. Carter (ONE FALSE MOVE) appear utterly incapable of staging anything to convey that they find any of this any more shocking or debased than your average marquee slasher, lighting the movie like a sitcom and framing even the most disturbing content with a listless disinterest. The title character is wearing a mask made from crudely skinned human flesh for the entire movie, but you’d never know this was in any way unusual behavior from the way the movie presents it. It’s there, but the movie makes nothing of it, and in doing so actively diminishes it. It hardly seems possible to take such inherently salacious material and render it so low-impact, but here we are.*****

There’s simply nothing in evidence here which would suggest why anyone involved thought this should be made, what was supposed to be good here. The best it can do is to settle on dimly reminding you of its more formidable predecessors. So it doesn’t really tell a story so much as it checks boxes. You gotta have the chainsaw in there, for example, so there’s a scene with a chainsaw. Now, nothing interesting or memorable happens with that chainsaw, but it’s in there, so it technically qualifies as a TEXAS CHAINSAW movie from a legal standpoint. I mean, you’ve got everything you would want in a TEXAS CHAINSAW movie in there; chainsaw, family dinner scene, creepy hitchhiker who turns out to be in on it, old grandpa propped up at the family table. The ingredients are there, it’s just that not only are none of them even remotely the kind of escalation you’d need by a third sequel to a iconic classic, but they’re also just milder and blander and phonier and more insubstantial in every conceivable way. It’s a movie which seems confused by its own existence, like a stagehand hanging out backstage who suddenly gets grabbed and shoved out in front of an audience by some banker hissing “do it like that other one!”

Which I guess is kinda what happened.

 * ONLY GOD FORGIVES would be a good modern example: a lot of well-meaning respectable citizens saw that trailer and said, “hey there, Martha, that cute young fella you liked so much in THE NOTEBOOK did some kind of  kung fu movie, how ‘bout we make a date night of it?” Most of them will never recover.

**He also plays a character named “Sargent Pepper” in DANCES WITH WOLVES, and that’s a true story.

*** Viggo Mortensen gets to die twice, which is an improvement from his baffling off-screen implied death in the theatrical version. Neither death is any good at all, and his second death is so badly lit that it’s almost indecipherable and was probably cut for clarity rather than delicacy, but I guess that’s a net gain in quantity-over-quality sort of way.

 **** Though it is a vast, vast improvement on the comically nonsensical theatrical ending tacked on by the producers without Burr’s involvement after the only thing test audiences seemed to remember is they liked Ken Foree, who we’re now inexplicably told has survived having his skull sawed open and his body laying submerged in a fetid swamp for several hours. Not that realism is exactly high on a list of my priorities for these movies, but it is at this point that we exit “horror movie logic” and enter the “Bugs Bunny cartoon” universe.

 ***** Alternate take: Here’s the only positive review of the movie I've ever heard of, and it still spends half the review talking about all the things that went wrong with the production, before making a long series of absolutely bewildering claims ("It makes Leatherface scary again!") as if they're established facts.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	The Terror Begins the Second It Starts, which is technically true, I guess, since we’re introduced in the midst of a different Chainsaw Massacre which has immediately preceded the one we will be observing.
TITLE ACCURACY	I mean, Leatherface is pretty prominent, they say it’s Texas even though it’s clearly not, there is a chainsaw, and if killing two people counts as a massacre, then sure. Actually come to think of it, the Sawyers take worse than they give here, so maybe the massacre is what happens to them.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	Yes, the third sequel of four in the original continuity (we don’t talk about the remake continuity around here)
REMAKE?	Not specifically, although I think with the prequel and everything the remake continuity is up to part 3 by now. Oops, I just broke the one rule I established regarding this issue. Forget I said anything
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Cannibals, slashers
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Ken Foree. I guess R. A. Milhailoff counts?
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No animals that I recall.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	Yes, the little girl has a baby-doll made from a child’s corpse, which, man, that’s so fucked up, I honestly don’t understand how the movie makes it seem like such a mild detail.
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	Yeah, I’d say so
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Definitely, in fact the first creep we encounter has precisely this desire.
MORAL OF THE STORY	If you absolutely must do battle with a clan of inbred cannibal psycho killers, you could absolutely do worse than running into Ken Foree for backup.

And barely a C-, but still technically proficient enough to save itself from a "D"