It Chapter 2

It Chapter 2 (2019)

Dir. Andy Muschietti

Written by Gary Dauberman, from half the novel It by Stephen King

Starring Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy, Bill Hader, Isaiah Mustafa, Jay Ryan, James Ransone, Bill Skarsgård

For some reason I really doubled down on the Stephen King for the start of this Chainsawnukah. I don’t know why, exactly; I mean, you’re not going to be able to watch 50+ horror movies in a single month without getting some Stephen King adaptations in there by sheer random chance, but I wasn’t really seeking them out, necessarily. And I wasn’t seeking IT CHAPTER 2 out, in particular; I’ve never read the book, was lukewarm at best about its predecessor, 2017’s IT CHAPTER 1, and was absolutely mystified by its titanic financial and popular success (it remains, by a substantial margin, the highest-grossing horror movie of all time). Its GOONIES-style “Losers Club” of spunky, potty-mouthed outcast kids endeared it to me somewhat (the youthful cast instill their characters with a lot of personality, even if they tend towards one-dimensional types) but ultimately I felt like the horror leaned too hard on flashy CG and ended up looking --and feeling—more like a busy, insubstantial comic book movie than a horror movie. Not really what I’m looking for this time of year. That, and, uh, pretty much everyone I talked to seems to be uniformly of the opinion that the “good part” of the novel was exclusively confined to the material with kids, and the associated material with the adults, 27 years later, was hot garbage. So I cannot say I had high hopes for CHAPTER 2.

Even going in with such low expectations, though, I emerged aghast at what a spectacularly empty 169 minutes this turns out to be. Every problem CHAPTER 1 had is amplified exponentially here, and virtually every bit of its charm is diminished. The movie is absolutely chock-a-block with self-defeating decisions, and nearly every one of which can be laid squarely at the feet of director Andy Muschietti (MAMA, CHAPTER 1) and screenwriter Gary Dauberman (ANNABELLE, working on his own this time, after previously adapting a script by Chase Palmer and Cary Fukunaga, who had been developing the film before Muschietti came on board). I mean, I suppose you could also easily blame King himself, from whose novel much of this dreck arises, but King at least didn’t bifurcate the story this way. As I understand it (and, having never read the novel, there remains a possibility that I actually don’t understand it) King essentially uses the “adult” material (set in 1985 in the book, and 2016 here) as a mystery framing device: we meet the adults at the outset of the novel, upon their return to Derry, Maine, 27 years after a summer that they mysteriously cannot remember, and the story of their childhood encounter with “It” in 1958 (1989 in the movie) unfolds gradually as they explore the town and recover their missing memory.

You can argue that some of the individual plot beats within this quest to recover their lost memory are pretty lousy (a sequence in which a giant statue of Paul Bunyan attacks Ritchie is a face-palming low point for the movie, and comes, of course, directly from King’s pen). But you cannot take issue with the novel’s nimble, parallel-timelines structure, a rather clever and narratively economical way of getting at King’s obvious goal in telling a story that straddles two decades: exploring the ways in which the past informs the present, how the people we were become the people we are. By sending his adult characters on a journey to re-discover their unhappy childhoods, he forces them to directly confront the unformed roots of the people they would become.

Alas, then, that separating the two parallel timelines into stubborn chronological order, as the filmmakers have done, makes absolutely dire wreckage out of King’s intent, and robs the entire plot of CHAPTER 2 of its basic reason for existence. Since the “adult” story was, in the book, basically a framing narrative --existing as a parallel echo of the “kids” story-- it naturally adopted a nearly identical form: the Losers club comes together, breaks apart, and finally reunites to confront the supernatural menace of “It” in its underground lair. When telling the two stories simultaneously, their similar structure is a logistical necessity. When telling them separately, however, it turns the whole second movie into a helpless retread of the first, made impossibly labored by the fact that we’re now an entire movie ahead of the characters. Dauberman, you see, has suicidally decided to retain the basic structure of a framing narrative, except that now it’s just framing a movie we’ve already seen and are now watching the sequel for. Rather than serving as a mysterious springboard for the tale, we now suffer through the now-adult characters agonizingly re-learning everything we saw them learn last time around.

If it wasn’t immediately obvious, we know from painful experience that turning framing stories into full movies is a bad idea. And this one is fucking 169 minutes! It’s like if they spent three hours and eighty million dollars making the famously flashback-padded SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 2. Except here’s the thing: nobody is going to tolerate an eighty million dollar film that’s fully 1/3 recycled footage, and yet the adult story manifestly exists only to facilitate flashbacks. So Muschietti and Dauberman’s solution is to have the adults flash back to new footage from the previous film’s time period. Which means in practice that, apparently, each child experienced exactly one additional haunting incident that wasn’t important enough to be included in its natural place somewhere in the middle of CHAPTER 1, and the adults must now flash back to that one specific and relatively minor incident to re-remember the events of the previous movie. Consequently CHAPTER 2 boasts a screaming psychotic structure which basically revolves entirely around a collection of out-takes from the first film, stapled to a bigger, louder, longer retread of CHAPTER 1’s already enervating lightshow finale. And did I mention it’s 169 fucking minutes?

Given all that, the film was probably doomed to failure no matter what, and yet, even so, it still manages to disappoint in other ways, though most remain tied to its fantastically counterproductive structure in one way or another. Chief among the remaining sins is its flagrant wasting of an excellent cast: if the movie has nothing else at all going for it (and it basically doesn’t), credit must be given for the spot-on casting of Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy, Jay Ryan, Bill Hader, Isaiah Mustafa, James Ransone and Andy Bean, each a pitch-perfect mirror for the specific idiosyncrasies projected by the younger originators of these roles (all of whom also appear in flashbacks here). Honest to god, for the first 40 minutes or so, the cast was so good that I almost thought there was some hope here; despite the mess of the structure, the film’s opening does at least an adequate enough job that, yoked to the fine performances of the adults, something of King’s original interest in examining the links between childhood and adulthood comes through. But those hopes are quickly dashed; after a promising and genuinely charming reunion dinner, the “Loser’s Club” gets split up again for separate time-wasting individual fetch quests, all of which serve yet again to hammer home the single personality trait each one was given in the previous film and let the corresponding adult vamp on that single personality trait* until it reaches the point of parody, at which point it is immediately forgotten and they each promptly lapse into interchangeable CG dolls to get tossed around by a giant poorly-designed computerized monster. Indeed, considering that the chief pleasure of CHAPTER 1 was almost entirely in its earnest depiction of these characters and their relationship, CHAPTER 2’s fanatical insistence on keeping them apart, and limiting their few interactions to businesslike exposition, seems downright sadistic, especially in light of the movie’s mammoth runtime.

You’ll notice, by the way, that so far I’ve been entirely silent on the subject of any actual genre content, which one might understandably expect would be the point, or at least a point, in a movie which is ostensibly about an evil clown (occasionally still Bill Skarsgård, though just as often a bunch of bland-looking ones and zero’s). One might understandably expect that, but not if one were Muschietti or Dauberman, who somehow manage to almost completely excise anything that could reasonably be called horror from the movie. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t think the horror elements in CHAPTER 1 worked, but at least they were there, recognizable as attempts at scare scenes. Here, aside from a brief return to Beverly’s childhood home and a little vignette which finds Pennywise luring a victim under some bleachers, there’s almost nothing whatsoever which seems even intended to creep you out. In fact, Pennywise rarely even appears, an unforgivable waste of the tremendously effective work Skarsgård put into the character the first time around. There are a few feints at some kind of weirdo, possibly EVIL-DEAD inspired gross-out scenes (a dinner sequence where the food turns into grotesque insects, a lengthy vomiting gag), and a good bit of frantic, expensive-looking CGI slugfests (the Paul Bunyan sequence, the endless climax), but ultimately the feel of the movie is much closer to some kind of quippy sci-fi adventure than any kind of horror movie. The weightless, mood-killing CGI is a part of that (see my review of CHAPTER 1 for a lengthy commentary on that subject) but a bigger part is simply the tone and design of the movie. It feels tongue-in-cheek and insubstantial in a way that CHAPTER 1, for all its faults, did not, mechanically grinding through its plot without ever bothering to ask what the point of any of this might be.**

In fact, the movie that makes for the most fitting comparison isn’t even its predecessor, or a horror film at all: it’s AVENGERS: ENDGAME. The parallels between the two are genuinely striking: First, both were made under the weight of nearly unmatched financial ambitions (following, as they do, the two previous highest-grossing films in their respective genres) and have the bloated budgets and absurdly distended runtimes to match those ambitions. But the similarities run deeper than that: both movies also divide neatly into a rigid three act-structure, with both movies employing a remarkably similar three acts: The first needlessly splits our core group apart, entirely for the purpose of checking back in on them as they deal with the consequences of a shared tragedy from years ago, before laboriously re-assembling them. The second then takes our laboriously re-assembled group and splits them up again, sending each on a separate fetch-quest for a totemic object from their past, while at the same time studiously avoiding materially interacting with that past in any meaningful way. Finally, the third act brings everyone back together again for an endless, monotonous slugfest against a giant, poorly-designed CGI enemy who must be ironically defeated with a taste of his own medicine.*** Both movies feature spectacularly overqualified casts stuffed into roles which are essentially elaborate busywork given weight only by the affection for the characters we bring with us from past adventures, and both somehow divide an epic length into such easily digestible, bite-size pieces that the sum total barely feels like a meal. More like distractedly binging on junk food for a few hours; you may notice some slight discomfort by the end, but you’ll be hard-pressed to specifically remember what might have caused it.

The result is a movie which can’t exactly be called unendurably awful, not in the same month where I’m likely to see Jess Franco movies and shit. The cast is likeable, there are occasionally some weird monsters or something, and to its credit, it moves along with a spritely energy that means you barely notice its intimidating length (I’m told this is a characteristic it shares with the novel), at least until the endless, shapeless final battle. But considering the advantages it had at its disposal, in terms of budget, cast, and opportunity, I can’t imagine a way to frame it that doesn’t feel like a gut-churning letdown, even with expectations suitably lowered. I don’t know, it might have been a hopeless cause from the get-go, but it could still damn well have added up to more than this. This feels like a movie with no clear explanation for its own existence, other than, you know, they titled the first one CHAPTER 1. Fortunately, it seems like people actually caught on this time: it made just a little over half of what its predecessor did in cinemas. I mean, it was still wildly profitable, but maybe, just maybe, that’s enough of a drop to make producers think it might be worthwhile to deliver a genuine horror movie next time.

*With the exception of Mike, who is again treated as such an afterthought that they don’t even bother giving him the one trait. Even calling him “their black friend” feels like a more distinct characterization than he gets here, despite Isaiah Mustafa’s (Old Spice Commercials, Shadowhunters) game attempts to suggest his mental state is a bit shaky after all these years.

** In particular, the film’s decision to open with a brutal hate crime which is then never addressed or remarked upon again strikes me as an illustrative specimen of CHAPTER 2’s chronic lack of intent. I realize this sequence comes from the book, but in 2019 it’s way too emotionally charged to just toss off and forget about. Any sane person could see that if they just stopped and thought about it for a second, but somehow the filmmakers just marched on with it.  

*** King himself appears in a cameo as a character who complains about lousy endings to horror novels. I mean, ha ha, but instead of just throwing up your hands and admitting your ending is terrible, why not think of a better one? CHAPTER 2’s insecurity about its lame ending all but drips from the screen –and I mean, deserved so, it sucks—but, like JURASSIC WORLD, that just makes it even lamer. Look guys, you fucking shot it, you spent months on the CGI and shit. At least have the conviction to stand behind what you made.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	You’ll Float Too [two?]. Weird to remind us of that, because actually no one floats here, they seem to have completely abandoned that idea from CHAPTER 1.
TITLE ACCURACY	More like part 2, but I’ll allow it.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Yes, from the 1986 novel by Stephen King
SEQUEL?	Yep, right there in the title.
REMAKE?	Arguably, since there is a well-remembered 1990 mini-series adapting the same material.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Clownsploitation?
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	At least Chastain and McAvoy. Oh, and Peter Bogdanovich has a cameo?
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Stephen King
NUDITY?	None (sorry, fans of the book’s original ending).
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Yes
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	One of Pennywise’s forms is of a zombie-type thing.
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Yes, Pennywise transforms itself into a wide number of forms
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	You need to have a better reason to make a 169-minute sequel than “there are some things in the book that we didn’t include in the first one.”

         

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"