So how stupid is Texas Chainsaw 3D?
Jan. 10th, 2013 05:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficWell, first off, stupid enough that it's called "Texas Chainsaw 3D" like it's an Asylum mockbuster instead of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D," which would point out that it's part of a series with one of the most iconic titles of the last century, and that it's in 3D.
*For added fun, read the rest of this in the bemusedly indignant tones of Brian Williams. I know I am*
Second, the movie begins hours after the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (ignoring that there were several sequels that would contradict this, making this a remake of the sequel to the original--a seboot, if you will). The authorities are called, and Sheriff Hooper--you can tell he's a good guy, despite being a Texan, because he's black--goes in to deal with the Sawyers alone. Here we find that the Sawyers are not a family of sick fucks that collectively tied up, terrorized, and tried to murder a young woman, but just a band of misunderstood underdogs--noble savages, if you will--defending their land from young people. You know. Like Liz Lemon.
Or Martin Zimmerman. Anyway, the movie's theme is that the Sawyers' family loyalty makes them morally superior to people who don't skin and eat teenagers, but despite this, after a stern talking-to from Hooper, they decide to give up Leatherface--or Jed, as he's been renamed here for some reason. But then, a bunch of Texans show up, and decide to lynch and/or burn and/or shoot all the Sawyers to death (they're admirably flexible on that point).
Now, I've got to think most people would say a mass execution is letting the Sawyers off easy, having seen the first movie, or even just the bits post-converted to 3D for this movie's credits. We are talking about a family that regularly killed people, barbecued them, and then sold their meat on the open market (assuming TCM2 is still in continuity, and that is where the name Sawyer came from in the first place, so it has to be).
But no! In the movie's universe, mob justice is a far worse crime than cannibalism and wearing people. The Sawyers are massacred, but one baby survives, and a vigilante takes the baby and does the mother in with a boot to the head. Which seems like a pretty lazy way to kill someone and steal their baby to me. What if she was just stunned? What if she gets up later and starts asking "Where's my baby?" But apparently that one kick was it for her, so on with the plot!
The Littlest Sawyer is raised in... Arkansas, apparently, because I guess her adopted parents traveled all the way into Texas to be part of a lynch mob. I mean, it's Texas. Not like it's a big state or anything. "Yeah, just gonna pop down to Texas, kill some cannibals, see if I can score a baby." Happens all the time. And despite her adopto-parents being willing to literally kill a woman to have a child, now they're negligent parents who don't seem to love or care about her at all, or vice versa, so there's no interesting thematic material at all and they end up getting comeuppance-killed by Leatherface after the credits because Lil Sawyer doesn't give a shit about the people who raised her?
Suddenly, Lil Sawyer learns that her grandmother has died and left her a giant mansion, since horror franchises always acquire an improbably Victorian mansion as the series progresses (see Halloween 4, Jason Goes To Hell). And apparently all the other Sawyers didn't want to or weren't allowed to live in this amazing mansion when they could live in squalor like in TCM1. Lil Sawyer and her friends, Lance Bass, Some Rapper Or Other, The Slutty One, and a Gay Hustler they pick up on the way to Texas, all go to this mansion. Being teenagers/twentysomethings in a horror movie, no one reads the Very Important letter Granny left for them, or even fully explores the house to find that Granny's dessicated corpse is still upstairs.
Which begs the question--how did her lawyer know she was dead to send the inheritance to Lil Sawyer? Did he just walk in, see the corpse, say "I'm not cleaning this mess up, let the next generation handle it"?
And guess what? Leatherface is still alive, having been held captive or something in the basement all these years by his loving Granny. Because that's more humane than putting him in an insane asylum? I'm pretty sure they have those in Texas. Naturally, he's set free--bewilderingly, there's an incredibly strong door that he can just teleport around or something, since there's a longish scene of Gay Hustler
Okay, I can't prove that he's really a Gay Hustler, but c'mon. C'MON.
trying to get through the door, so you think that'd be what's keeping Leatherface locked away, but no. Apparently not. I guess it's just a door that sticks or something.
Anyway, he dies first, the Slutty One and Some Rapper have some offscreen sex (sawing people in half on-screen, okay, showing more than a woman's skimpy lingerie, WHOA THERE, HOLD ON!), you'd think this would explain why Lil Sawyer doesn't seem to mind her friends being murdered later on in the movie, but she never finds out that her best friend and boyfriend were having a threesome minus her. Lil Sawyer is knocked out and taken to watch Leatherface with the meat hooks and the face cutting off and you know the score, but since he hasn't done anything to tie her up or restrain her, she's able to escape. Quite easily.
Well, the guy is mentally handicapped. The important thing is that he tried, and therefore no one should criticize him.
Those who've survived and what's left of them get away in their van, but it's wrecked after the Rapper decides to drive through the automatic gate instead of waiting for it to open. Despite that stupidity, and the fact that he cheated on the heroine, he gets a quick death in the car accident while the Slutty One is dragged back to the house, stuffed in a freezer, and shot by a trigger-happy cop. Because slasher movies hate women.
Lil Sawyer runs for it, ending up at a Halloween fair where the crowd of Texans prove that a six-foot-five man chasing a bloody young woman into a chainlink fence and then sawing through it isn't quite as much an attention-grabber as a Tilt-A-Whirl. Whoa! It tilts and whirls!
But ol' Leatherface gets their attention by running into the fair and slashing--the air. A lot. Good God, even Friday The 13th: Jason Takes Manhattan let Jason cut up a few short-order chefs and gang members when he was in New York. Here we have a psychopathic man-child, a running chainsaw, and crowds of innocent people--nothing. What kind of arithmetic is that?
TV's Justin Hartley, or one of the fifty young actors with his bland good looks, is a deputy that saves Lil Sawyer and takes her back to the station. A deputy goes to investigate the car crash and discovers no bodies, but that there is a blood trail leading back to the house. Sheriff Hooper, who is still black and thus morally right, tells him not to follow it; this despite the fact that he has eyewitness reports of a young woman still alive in the car wreck and possibly being in danger as they speak. Nonetheless, it's Bret Hartman, the leader of the lynch mob from days gone by and now mayor that orders the deputy to continue on. Since he is the bad guy, this proves to be a bad call. For some reason, Sheriff Hooper does not send any back-up, nor get off his own fat ass to join the deputy just in case the giant chainsaw-wielding psychopath is too much for one individual to handle.
Meanwhile, Lil Sawyer is left alone with evidence of the mob justice that spared her from a life of eating people and wearing their skin, which apparently upsets her. Goddamnit, she could've been so cool! Human skin--totally vintage!
She also sees that there's a newspaper headline showing the mob justice and saying that the vigilantes were "LOCAL HEROES," which means the town's dirty little secret (and Hartman's attempts to cover it up... ???) is public knowledge and was surely widely disseminated via the media of the time through programs like Dateline or Unsolved Mysteries. She probably could've figured out the whole plot of this thing just by Googling her long-lost grandmother before she drove down into the ballsweat of Texas. But no.
The deputy uses a chronologically unlikely smartphone to send video of the crime scene back to the police station. Because apparently this movie takes place in the modern day and the original TCM took place in, what, 1992? The deputy's smartphone drops the call before Leatherface drops him, making that technological anachronism completely unnecessary. Lil Sawyer meets up with the family lawyer again, and since she didn't read the Very Important letter like he told her too, he repeats the information it contained in small words and with colorful pictures.
Actual line: "Jed doesn't know you're his cousin. He'll keep coming after you. The last girl he let get away* led to him losing his whole family. He doesn't know any better."
*(AFTER HE KILLED AND ATE HER FRIENDS)
I know a lot of slasher movies are geared toward audiences rooting for the killers to end dumb teenagers in creative ways, and that's actually more wholesome than this torture-porn/Rob Zombie's Halloween trend, but DAYMN.
Just then, Bret Hartman comes in after Lil Sawyer, now convinced she's in on her own attempted murder and the actual murder of her friends because genetics. Given later plot developments, this is actually not unreasonable. She runs for it, getting into a police car with TV's Justin Hartley, but he turns out to be in on it, since he's Hartman's son! Which makes him morally right according to the film's logic, since he's standing up for his blood relatives over the law, but fuck him, he doesn't wear people as clothes!!!
Lil Hartman takes Lil Sawyer to the old-abandoned-but-still-fully-functional slaughterhouse, since the screenwriters have grasped that this is thematically keeping with the Sawyers killing and eating people, but not that killing and eating people is wrong. There, Lil Hartman ties Lil Sawyer up and accidentally rips her shirt open, which is why most people button up more than the two buttons on their shirt directly over the cleavage. We only see side-boob, since cutting a person's face off on-screen is something American audiences are ready for, but not a nipple.
Luckily, this exposes the scar she got as a baby when the S-shaped pendant that all the Sawyer women wear was heated up by the fire and burned her. Somehow, this scar has stayed exactly the same shape and size despite the skin that it was on growing from baby to adulthood, which I guess is how scar tissue works? I don't know, apparently Harry Potter is a documentary now.
Thus, when Leatherface happens upon her, he realizes that she's a cousin and thus one of the few people he shouldn't kill/eat/wear. This understanding of right and wrong means that he is not criminally insane and thus should be held fully accountable for his actions. However, this position is supported in the movie by Texans, so fuck 'em! Bret Hartman and his barber henchman (?), but strikingly not his cop son (who receives no comeuppance or any appearance in the movie from hereon), attack Leatherface, trussing him up and sending him toward being cut up in one of the giant grinders that all movie slaughterhouses have.
Despite him killing all her friends, this is not alright with Lil Sawyer, who runs back to free Leatherface and help him kill Bret Hartman. This is seen by Sheriff Hooper, who draws his gun and is about to fire to stop Leatherface, the serial killer, from murdering the mayor. However, having spent the entire movie being against vigilante justice, he now decides that vigilante justice is alright and allows the skin-wearing cannibal to take his vengeance and escape, letting four young lives go unavenged. He quotes Bret Hartman's earlier words about "an eye for an eye," though since he has now demonstrated by word and action that he actually agrees with the mayor's moral position, I'm not sure what the hell stick he has up his ass.
Leatherface and Lil Sawyer return home, where she finally reads the letter. It does not in any way explain the unestablished open grave that showed up in an earlier chase scene when she needed to hide in the Sawyer family plot. We were already shown her grandmother's grave, apparently filled despite her finding Granny's corpse upstairs. Did some random old woman just come into the house and drop dead? Apparently.
Anyway, Lil Sawyer decides to stay in the blood-soaked mansion where everyone she loved died and take care of Leatherface, who killed them. Which will surely do wonders for her dating life. This does not make her a slasher in her own right, since this is apparently the right and moral course to take. Who knows what the sequel will be about, since one assumes all the other Sawyers are dead, Leatherface is just a scared little boy in a grown man's body who will be corralled by Lil Sawyer, and Lil Sawyer is somehow supposed to be a good person in all of this.
Somehow, this winds up being the one slasher movie reboot that gets a sequel, not Scream 4, Friday the 13th, or countless smarter films like Jennifer's Body. But hell, at least it's not The Tall Man.
ETA: At one point The Slutty One grabs a conveniently working and loaded shotgun from a pick-up truck that no one possibly could've been maintaining and takes a shot at Leatherface, screaming "Welcome to Texas, motherfucker!" But... he lives in Texas. You're the one who came to Texas from another state. You can't be welcoming him ANYWHERE YOU IDIOTS--ALL YOU OF EARTH ARE IDIOTS!
*For added fun, read the rest of this in the bemusedly indignant tones of Brian Williams. I know I am*
Second, the movie begins hours after the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (ignoring that there were several sequels that would contradict this, making this a remake of the sequel to the original--a seboot, if you will). The authorities are called, and Sheriff Hooper--you can tell he's a good guy, despite being a Texan, because he's black--goes in to deal with the Sawyers alone. Here we find that the Sawyers are not a family of sick fucks that collectively tied up, terrorized, and tried to murder a young woman, but just a band of misunderstood underdogs--noble savages, if you will--defending their land from young people. You know. Like Liz Lemon.
Or Martin Zimmerman. Anyway, the movie's theme is that the Sawyers' family loyalty makes them morally superior to people who don't skin and eat teenagers, but despite this, after a stern talking-to from Hooper, they decide to give up Leatherface--or Jed, as he's been renamed here for some reason. But then, a bunch of Texans show up, and decide to lynch and/or burn and/or shoot all the Sawyers to death (they're admirably flexible on that point).
Now, I've got to think most people would say a mass execution is letting the Sawyers off easy, having seen the first movie, or even just the bits post-converted to 3D for this movie's credits. We are talking about a family that regularly killed people, barbecued them, and then sold their meat on the open market (assuming TCM2 is still in continuity, and that is where the name Sawyer came from in the first place, so it has to be).
But no! In the movie's universe, mob justice is a far worse crime than cannibalism and wearing people. The Sawyers are massacred, but one baby survives, and a vigilante takes the baby and does the mother in with a boot to the head. Which seems like a pretty lazy way to kill someone and steal their baby to me. What if she was just stunned? What if she gets up later and starts asking "Where's my baby?" But apparently that one kick was it for her, so on with the plot!
The Littlest Sawyer is raised in... Arkansas, apparently, because I guess her adopted parents traveled all the way into Texas to be part of a lynch mob. I mean, it's Texas. Not like it's a big state or anything. "Yeah, just gonna pop down to Texas, kill some cannibals, see if I can score a baby." Happens all the time. And despite her adopto-parents being willing to literally kill a woman to have a child, now they're negligent parents who don't seem to love or care about her at all, or vice versa, so there's no interesting thematic material at all and they end up getting comeuppance-killed by Leatherface after the credits because Lil Sawyer doesn't give a shit about the people who raised her?
Suddenly, Lil Sawyer learns that her grandmother has died and left her a giant mansion, since horror franchises always acquire an improbably Victorian mansion as the series progresses (see Halloween 4, Jason Goes To Hell). And apparently all the other Sawyers didn't want to or weren't allowed to live in this amazing mansion when they could live in squalor like in TCM1. Lil Sawyer and her friends, Lance Bass, Some Rapper Or Other, The Slutty One, and a Gay Hustler they pick up on the way to Texas, all go to this mansion. Being teenagers/twentysomethings in a horror movie, no one reads the Very Important letter Granny left for them, or even fully explores the house to find that Granny's dessicated corpse is still upstairs.
Which begs the question--how did her lawyer know she was dead to send the inheritance to Lil Sawyer? Did he just walk in, see the corpse, say "I'm not cleaning this mess up, let the next generation handle it"?
And guess what? Leatherface is still alive, having been held captive or something in the basement all these years by his loving Granny. Because that's more humane than putting him in an insane asylum? I'm pretty sure they have those in Texas. Naturally, he's set free--bewilderingly, there's an incredibly strong door that he can just teleport around or something, since there's a longish scene of Gay Hustler
Okay, I can't prove that he's really a Gay Hustler, but c'mon. C'MON.
trying to get through the door, so you think that'd be what's keeping Leatherface locked away, but no. Apparently not. I guess it's just a door that sticks or something.
Anyway, he dies first, the Slutty One and Some Rapper have some offscreen sex (sawing people in half on-screen, okay, showing more than a woman's skimpy lingerie, WHOA THERE, HOLD ON!), you'd think this would explain why Lil Sawyer doesn't seem to mind her friends being murdered later on in the movie, but she never finds out that her best friend and boyfriend were having a threesome minus her. Lil Sawyer is knocked out and taken to watch Leatherface with the meat hooks and the face cutting off and you know the score, but since he hasn't done anything to tie her up or restrain her, she's able to escape. Quite easily.
Well, the guy is mentally handicapped. The important thing is that he tried, and therefore no one should criticize him.
Those who've survived and what's left of them get away in their van, but it's wrecked after the Rapper decides to drive through the automatic gate instead of waiting for it to open. Despite that stupidity, and the fact that he cheated on the heroine, he gets a quick death in the car accident while the Slutty One is dragged back to the house, stuffed in a freezer, and shot by a trigger-happy cop. Because slasher movies hate women.
Lil Sawyer runs for it, ending up at a Halloween fair where the crowd of Texans prove that a six-foot-five man chasing a bloody young woman into a chainlink fence and then sawing through it isn't quite as much an attention-grabber as a Tilt-A-Whirl. Whoa! It tilts and whirls!
But ol' Leatherface gets their attention by running into the fair and slashing--the air. A lot. Good God, even Friday The 13th: Jason Takes Manhattan let Jason cut up a few short-order chefs and gang members when he was in New York. Here we have a psychopathic man-child, a running chainsaw, and crowds of innocent people--nothing. What kind of arithmetic is that?
TV's Justin Hartley, or one of the fifty young actors with his bland good looks, is a deputy that saves Lil Sawyer and takes her back to the station. A deputy goes to investigate the car crash and discovers no bodies, but that there is a blood trail leading back to the house. Sheriff Hooper, who is still black and thus morally right, tells him not to follow it; this despite the fact that he has eyewitness reports of a young woman still alive in the car wreck and possibly being in danger as they speak. Nonetheless, it's Bret Hartman, the leader of the lynch mob from days gone by and now mayor that orders the deputy to continue on. Since he is the bad guy, this proves to be a bad call. For some reason, Sheriff Hooper does not send any back-up, nor get off his own fat ass to join the deputy just in case the giant chainsaw-wielding psychopath is too much for one individual to handle.
Meanwhile, Lil Sawyer is left alone with evidence of the mob justice that spared her from a life of eating people and wearing their skin, which apparently upsets her. Goddamnit, she could've been so cool! Human skin--totally vintage!
She also sees that there's a newspaper headline showing the mob justice and saying that the vigilantes were "LOCAL HEROES," which means the town's dirty little secret (and Hartman's attempts to cover it up... ???) is public knowledge and was surely widely disseminated via the media of the time through programs like Dateline or Unsolved Mysteries. She probably could've figured out the whole plot of this thing just by Googling her long-lost grandmother before she drove down into the ballsweat of Texas. But no.
The deputy uses a chronologically unlikely smartphone to send video of the crime scene back to the police station. Because apparently this movie takes place in the modern day and the original TCM took place in, what, 1992? The deputy's smartphone drops the call before Leatherface drops him, making that technological anachronism completely unnecessary. Lil Sawyer meets up with the family lawyer again, and since she didn't read the Very Important letter like he told her too, he repeats the information it contained in small words and with colorful pictures.
Actual line: "Jed doesn't know you're his cousin. He'll keep coming after you. The last girl he let get away* led to him losing his whole family. He doesn't know any better."
*(AFTER HE KILLED AND ATE HER FRIENDS)
I know a lot of slasher movies are geared toward audiences rooting for the killers to end dumb teenagers in creative ways, and that's actually more wholesome than this torture-porn/Rob Zombie's Halloween trend, but DAYMN.
Just then, Bret Hartman comes in after Lil Sawyer, now convinced she's in on her own attempted murder and the actual murder of her friends because genetics. Given later plot developments, this is actually not unreasonable. She runs for it, getting into a police car with TV's Justin Hartley, but he turns out to be in on it, since he's Hartman's son! Which makes him morally right according to the film's logic, since he's standing up for his blood relatives over the law, but fuck him, he doesn't wear people as clothes!!!
Lil Hartman takes Lil Sawyer to the old-abandoned-but-still-fully-functional slaughterhouse, since the screenwriters have grasped that this is thematically keeping with the Sawyers killing and eating people, but not that killing and eating people is wrong. There, Lil Hartman ties Lil Sawyer up and accidentally rips her shirt open, which is why most people button up more than the two buttons on their shirt directly over the cleavage. We only see side-boob, since cutting a person's face off on-screen is something American audiences are ready for, but not a nipple.
Luckily, this exposes the scar she got as a baby when the S-shaped pendant that all the Sawyer women wear was heated up by the fire and burned her. Somehow, this scar has stayed exactly the same shape and size despite the skin that it was on growing from baby to adulthood, which I guess is how scar tissue works? I don't know, apparently Harry Potter is a documentary now.
Thus, when Leatherface happens upon her, he realizes that she's a cousin and thus one of the few people he shouldn't kill/eat/wear. This understanding of right and wrong means that he is not criminally insane and thus should be held fully accountable for his actions. However, this position is supported in the movie by Texans, so fuck 'em! Bret Hartman and his barber henchman (?), but strikingly not his cop son (who receives no comeuppance or any appearance in the movie from hereon), attack Leatherface, trussing him up and sending him toward being cut up in one of the giant grinders that all movie slaughterhouses have.
Despite him killing all her friends, this is not alright with Lil Sawyer, who runs back to free Leatherface and help him kill Bret Hartman. This is seen by Sheriff Hooper, who draws his gun and is about to fire to stop Leatherface, the serial killer, from murdering the mayor. However, having spent the entire movie being against vigilante justice, he now decides that vigilante justice is alright and allows the skin-wearing cannibal to take his vengeance and escape, letting four young lives go unavenged. He quotes Bret Hartman's earlier words about "an eye for an eye," though since he has now demonstrated by word and action that he actually agrees with the mayor's moral position, I'm not sure what the hell stick he has up his ass.
Leatherface and Lil Sawyer return home, where she finally reads the letter. It does not in any way explain the unestablished open grave that showed up in an earlier chase scene when she needed to hide in the Sawyer family plot. We were already shown her grandmother's grave, apparently filled despite her finding Granny's corpse upstairs. Did some random old woman just come into the house and drop dead? Apparently.
Anyway, Lil Sawyer decides to stay in the blood-soaked mansion where everyone she loved died and take care of Leatherface, who killed them. Which will surely do wonders for her dating life. This does not make her a slasher in her own right, since this is apparently the right and moral course to take. Who knows what the sequel will be about, since one assumes all the other Sawyers are dead, Leatherface is just a scared little boy in a grown man's body who will be corralled by Lil Sawyer, and Lil Sawyer is somehow supposed to be a good person in all of this.
Somehow, this winds up being the one slasher movie reboot that gets a sequel, not Scream 4, Friday the 13th, or countless smarter films like Jennifer's Body. But hell, at least it's not The Tall Man.
ETA: At one point The Slutty One grabs a conveniently working and loaded shotgun from a pick-up truck that no one possibly could've been maintaining and takes a shot at Leatherface, screaming "Welcome to Texas, motherfucker!" But... he lives in Texas. You're the one who came to Texas from another state. You can't be welcoming him ANYWHERE YOU IDIOTS--ALL YOU OF EARTH ARE IDIOTS!
