"The buzz is back," runs the poster tagline. That's about the only inspiration associated with this dreadful film, showing uncut at last after 15 years in censorship limbo.
The buzz needn't have bothered. Tobe Hooper's sequel to his first extraordinary film, itself the longest sustained piece of horror in recent cinema, yet entirely bloodless, turns out to be an unbelievably trashy, crude, gory, tedious, amateurish mess. Its height of salacious horror is Leatherface prodding the pig-squealing heroine (Caroline Williams) in the crotch of her denim hot pants with his phallic chain saw, momentarily not in buzz mode.
Dennis Hopper, as a cop tracking down the butchers, shows what actors will do for the money. Not that there looks to have been much of that spread around.
The producers are Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, names I'm glad to say I haven't seen on any respectable screen for ages. But those with long memories will recall they are the Israeli interlopers who formed Cannon Films and were allowed by the asinine decision of the Rt Hon Paul Channon, then Secretary of State at the Department of Trade and Industry, to buy Thorn-EMI in 1986, and thus acquire virtually half the British film industry: Elstree studios, the ABC cinema chain, the Pathé newsreel collection and a 2,000-film library including the Ealing comedies.
Barely two years later, a cash-strapped Cannon stripped its assets to the bone and sold them to another bunch of entrepreneurs, some of whom finished up in prison.
From that unforgivable act of folly by our own government bureaucrats, as ignorant then as they are now of how the film industry really functions, comes a great deal of our present cinema stagnation.
I don't thank Chainsaw 2 for reminding me.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
Cert: cert18
