Census Bloodbath: For Goodness Sake

Year: 1989

Director: Monte Hellman

Cast: Samantha Scully, Bill Moseley, Richard Beymer

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The genesis of Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! is about as ignominious as a direct-to-video sequel can get. When director Monte Hellman was approached by his friend, who was producing the film, he only agreed to it because he had a wild fever and thought he was going to die. As it happens, he did not - in fact - perish, and he ended up at the helm of a low rent sequel to a low rent recut of an OK slasher in 1989, the year of the subgenre's ignoble death.

As you can imagine, the resulting film isn't exactly an undiscovered gem of 80's horror. But at least it's in reluctant continuity with the first two films, stretching itself rather farther than other - more prominent - franchises managed to do (Halloween III is notorious for not being about Michael Myers at all, but an evil mask company powered by Stonehenge. And it only took Nightmare on Elm Street one movie to turn into a gay body horror parable.). I mean, the film is insane, completely twisting the character of Ricky to fit into the post-Nightmare supernatural model, giving him a brain-exposing helmet that looks like a macabre terrarium and transplanting him from Utah to Southern California. But yes, this is actually a storyline worthy of commendation.

What passed for continuity in the slasher genre could only have survived in a decade powered by copious amounts of cocaine.

The film (when it finally begins after an interminably dull opening dream sequence where we see a girl sleep for two minutes then walk slowly around a white room for twice that) revolves around the exploits of drunk-on-science Doctor Newbury (Richard Beymer), who has a coma patient/ex-Santa Claus axe murderer named Ricky Caldwell (Bill Moseley of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2) under his care. He experiments with a psychic blind girl named Laura (Samantha Scully) and attempts to use her dreams to access Ricky's subconscious memories*.

After a drunk hospital Santa carouses his way into Ricky's room on Christmas Eve, the catatonic serial killer is awoken by the twin naughty sins of yuletide inebriation and terrible puns ("Who's your favorite singer? Perry Coma?"). His seasonal rage is reignited and he uses his psychic link with Laura to follow her to her grandmother's place in Piru (this sequel is so firmly entrenched in its region, it would be commendable if it didn't so boldly fly in the face of the beautiful Utah scenery of the first film). With his brain firmly ensconced in its space-age chapeau and his trusty knife in hand, he skulks around Granny's (Elizabeth Hoffman) farm, putting Laura, her brother Chris (Eric DaRe of Twin Peaks), and his girlfriend Jerri (Laura Herring) at risk.

While Ricky's on the prowl, he is pursued by Dr. Newbury and the police Lieutenant Connely (Robert Culp). Either the budget was too limited or Robert Culp was too important, but these scenes almost entirely take place inside the car en route, presumably shot through in the course of one evening. So the film switches between dreary horror and the oddly homoerotic tensions between the two pursuers as the doctor spouts thoughtful monologues like he had eaten a thesaurus for lunch and it was beginning to disagree with him ("[blowing smoke up your ass] sounds like an enterprise of great pith and circumstance...").

*After the success of A Nightmare on Elm Street, these types of paranormal elements began creeping into the even the most stalwartly traditional of slasher franchises. Jason became a zombie and fought a telekinetic Final Girl. Michael became the victim of a druid cult. And the Prom Night franchise got crossfaded with the movie Carrie and featured a magical prom ghost for two of its middle entries.

What a magical decade.

Centering the plot around a family returning home for the holidays is a good move. It keeps the Christmas spirit intact because it's firmly entrenched in the plot itself. This is a great benefit because Ricky no longer takes on his Santa persona and the number of Christmas-related kills is nil. Come to think of it, the number of actual kills is just about nil as well, considering that just about every death takes place offscreen. There are some brief, half-hearted gore shots (some intestines and a surprisingly decent-looking severed head), but they take place long after the fact and are entirely separate from the action of the moment. They're more like a brief series of grisly tableaux than actual special effects integrated into the film itself.

Because of the dearth of decent special effects and the lethargic pacing of the plot itself, the film perfectly captures the feeling of slowly drifting off to sleep. This may have been what they were going for, I suppose, but I do not feel willing to bestow the benefit of the doubt upon a horror film with such anemic, plodding scares. Even the attack scenes in the finale are staged with deliberate pacing and stuffy presentationalism like a particularly arid episode of Masterpiece Theatre. Not even the music is attempting to spruce things up, largely sitting out the big scenes, and filling the moments in which it does appear with a shrilly sustained pitch like a hyperactive dog whistle. In fact, one kill is literally accompanied by the sound of crickets.

Silent Night Deadly Night III is mostly not even bad-good, which is a register with which this franchise has proven itself very familiar, so it's quite a disappointment. It's merely a perplexing botchery of the cabin in the woods genre. The paranormal elements are ill-established and have no payoff (also, Granny is psychic enough to know when the phone's about to ring but not deduce that the silent man stolidly eating mashed potatoes at her dinner table with his brain exposed is about to kill her), the kills are limp dishwater, and there's not even any exploitation of particular interest. Although Chris' bathtub scene and prodigious pelt of chest hair are charming in a soothingly retro sort of way.

A cheapo exploitation horror movie that sees fit to include a bath scene, yet neither kills the characters nor has them bang is a thorough waste of time.

Never forget this image when you're watching evil Leo be evil in Twin Peaks.

The mystical pure 80's factor is present in enough of the film to keep the suitably historical-minded engaged despite the extreme defecits of the plot and presentation. It comes through with especial strength in scenes like the lieutenant extolling the virtues of his car phone, Jerri offering Laura a naturally carbonated water with a look of reverent wonder on her face, and the fashion. 

Oh, the fashion! Chris, on top of looking like an anthropomorphic mop, drapes himself with denim to the point where I can only assume his underwear is likewise blue and scratchy. And Laura's outfit for a large portion of the film seems to be of a fashion movement entirely unknown to me called "business witch." 

Also, her earrings are, like, totally righteous.

On top of this, there are several (well, one or two) actively good elements of the film, though they rear their heads too rarely to actively applaud. First, the director seems to be somewhat present, unlike the previous films, festooning the movie with little visual fillips that are in a realm somewhere adjacent to cinema. My favorite of these moments is when Ricky gets up from his hospital bed, represented by a close-up of his IV unhooking. It's inelegant, but it evokes an image and an emotional response, something desperately lacking by most of the other moments.

And Scully is a decent Final Girl (the first legitimate character of that type in the series). She can't scream worth a lick, but there's a few lines of dialogue that feel lived-in and warm. Eric DaRe is another standout, his chemistry with the other actors proving to be a vital element in not wanting to drown oneself while watching the film.

Would you look at that? I'm ending on a high note. Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! certainly doesn't deserve it, but hey. It's Christmastime.

Killer: Ricky Caldwell (Bill Moseley)

Final Girl: Laura Anderson (Samantha Scully)

Best Kill: Dr. Newbury is stabbed in the gut and during his death scene (like 20 minutes later) we get to see his intestines. This is the extent of interesting visuals in the film.

Sign of the Times: Chris' badass gun-totin' one-liner is "Is it live, or is it Memorex?"

Scariest Moment: Laura tries to rush out the door, but is blocked by Chris and Jerri coming back inside. It's.... not the scariest film I've ever seen.

Weirdest Moment: When a gas station attendant is off being decapitated, his girlfriend talks dirty through the phone on the desk.

Champion Dialogue: "Who said you had to be the world's champion blind orphan?"

Body Count: 11; not including a nurse who dies in a dream or a man whose eyes are pecked out by a bird on TV. Kills that appear in flashback footage from Silent Night, Deadly Night are in italics.

1. Ellie Chapman Caldwell has her throat slit.
2. Hospital Santa is killed offscreen.
3. Receptionist is killed offscreen.
4. Father O'Brien Old Man Kelsey is shot to death. 
5. PT Cruiser Driver is killed offscreen.
6. Gas Station Greg is decapitated offscreen.
7. Granny is hung offscreen.
8. Dr. Newbury is stabbed in the gut.
9. Jerri is stabbed in the chest offscreen.
10. Chris is choked with a shotgun.
11. Ricky is shot and impaled on a pool cue. 

TL;DR: Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! is a boring sequel that keeps its best moments offscreen.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1635

Reviews In This Series

Silent Night, Deadly Night (Sellier Jr., 1984)

Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (Harry, 1987)

Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! (Hellman, 1989)

Silent Night, Deadly Night IV: Initiation (Yuzna, 1990)

Silent Night, Deadly Night V: The Toy Maker (Kitrosser, 1991)

Silent Night (Miller, 2012)

Census Bloodbath: Texas Battle Land

Year: 1986

Director: Tobe Hooper

Cast: Dennis Hopper, Caroline Williams, Jim Siedow

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: UR

Is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, coming out 12 years after the original film, one of the longest sequel gaps in recorded history? Actually, yes. It comes in at around number 21, beaten out by none other than the 46 year gap preceding Return to Oz, among a few additional elder statesmen of film franchises. But although it's not the most impressive hiatus in cinema history, I'd like to argue that it's one of the most impactful.

1974's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre saw Tobe Hooper as a hungry young filmmaker, eager to rattle the walls of the nihilistic and beaten-down 1970's with the oppressive heat of Texas. But as the years passed, the times drastically changed. Hooper failed to recapture the grubby magic of Texas Chain Saw in Salem's Lot and The Funhouse, saw creative control of Poltergeist wrested away from him by producer Steven Spielberg (exactly how much control he ceded is still the topic of furious debate and a topic far too complex for a mere frail parenthetical), and hit rock bottom with his high budget space vampire flop Lifeforce.

As Hooper's life-force (so to speak) was draining, the country itself was beginning to perk up. The economic downturn that permeated the previous decade had begun to reverse itself and the populace began to turn to rampant consumerism once more. Nuclear fears, Reagan's presidency, and the AIDS crisis were still occupying people's minds, but the nation had taken an upward tack that would spring them forth into the blissful 90's.

Even more significant to the film we are discussing today is the massive face-lift the horror genre had received since the original Chain Saw. The slasher boom had come and gone, rising like a phoenix from the ashes of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter with the advent of the supernatural, heralded by A Nightmare on Elm Street and its soon-to-be comic superstar Freddy Krueger. The enduring popularity of the slasher formula ruled the silver screen, seeping into films to the point of exhaustion; by the mid-80's even ghost and exorcism stories had to have a supple teen cast picked off one by one and even movies completely outside the genre fell victim to this insidious disease.

The genre ushered into being by Texas Chain Saw soon found no use for its brutal, unappealing, nihilism and squalor, so Tobe Hooper was faced with a tough decision. A sequel to his immensely popular film could reboot his career, but there was just no space in the market for something so grim and intense. This post is getting a little long in the tooth and I haven't even mentioned a single character yet, so I'll cut to the chase. Let me direct your attention to the poster at the top of this post, then to the image below. Seem familiar?

Unless you have the attention span of a Drew Barrymore character, it should.

I hope it has become immediately obvious that Hooper decided to adopt a comedic tone with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. It's by no means an outright comedy, but it is light years more lighthearted than its predecessor. Filled to the brim with pop culture references (among other mentions, we get Rambo 3, the censored Beatles baby massacre cover, and enough rock and roll bands to fuel the cocaine market for a small country), silly props, and even - I kid you not - a couple puns. That's 100% more wordplay than The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

It's an interesting decision but by no means a bad one. Trying to recreate the original film's mood would be like Will Smith having a kid - it wouldn't turn out as good and nobody would want to see it. Especially with the amount of story beats that are copied from the original, it's a definite bonus to have a new tone to chew on - it keeps things lively and entertaining.

But for all the repetition this film has (including an almost word for word recreation of the dinner party scene), there is a heaping helping of brand new elements that keep the films firmly planted in its new wacky atmosphere. Our new Final Girl (if any Chain Saw chick could truly be considered one) is Stretch (Caroline Williams - a genre veteran with appearances in Stepfather 2, Halloween II, and Hatchet III to name just a few), an Oklahoma rock 'n roll DJ with a passion for just about anything other than being stuck in a rinky dink booth surrounded by old records.

After a pair of prank callers (Who are two of the most poisonously douchey characters in the history of cinema. Never have I wanted a set of opening scene characters to die more and I lived through the anthropomorphic nuclear waste that is Harold and Edna of Friday the 13th Part 3.) are chainsaw massacred while phoning into the station from North Texas, Stretch teams up with Lieutenant "Lefty" Enright (Dennis Hopper), the uncle of Sally and Franklin from the first film (Though later he acts like an older brother, so who can be sure? Not Hooper, if the amount of pot he smoked in the 80's has anything to say about it.).

Lefty has been searching for the mysterious cannibal family for over a decade and uses Stretch as bait to draw them out into the open.

A brilliant plan - that sequined jacket is visible from space.

One thing leads to another and Stretch is trapped underground with the villainous Sawyers in their new abode - an abandoned theme park. Returning by popular demand are a rather svelte looking Leatherface (Bill Johnson), his even more withered grandfather (Ken Evert), and his father the Cook (Jim Siedow, the only returning cast member). And although Leatherface's brother the Hitchhiker found himself on the wrong end of a Mack truck last go-around, he finds a surrogate in Chop-Top (Bill Moseley, another genre veteran also in Texas Chainsaw 3D, Halloween 2007, Army of Darkness, Silent Night, Deadly Night III, and perhaps most notably, Evil Bong), an equally crazy Sawyer brother newly returned from his stint in Vietnam.

Despite the immense shift in tone which, despite not being an outright laugh riot, is quietly successful in its own way, Hooper is up to his old tricks but with a little more stylistic panache. That is to say, this film is more overtly styled than Texas Chain Saw, not that the aesthetic is any better. Although comparing the visual schema of that film and its sequel is like comparing apples and ball gags - they're both highly effective but serve entirely different functions.

In this film, Hooper indulges in a color scheme beyond brown and grey, splashing vivid reds, blues, and greens across the frame in broad swaths. Especially in the terrifically manic nightmare theme park set that contains the third act, this creates a sense of carnival thrills and spills, rather making up for everything that 1981's The Funhouse isn't.

The Funhouse could have definitely used more chainsaws. Or more Dennis Hopper. Or more... anything that isn't me crying tears of boredom.

And in spite of everything, there are moments when Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is actually scary. Because the franchise is so palpably deranged and twisted, these moments rely more on character dynamics than jump scares so it's a tremendous boon that the replacement actors are almost entirely top notch. Johnson obviously can't do quite as much with Leatherface as Hansen could, but his performance darn near cuts it close, adding an extra dimension to the character in what could have been a tremendously clumsy love subplot using naught but his eyes and tongue.

Likewise, Bill Moseley is an excellent addition to the family, revamping Edwin Neal's frenzied Hitchhiker for the modern age and seamlessly straddling the twin tones of comedy and horror, milking each one for everything they're worth. And the gore (of course there's gore now, it's 1986 for crying out loud) is spruced up by maestro of the macabre Tom Savini. It's perhaps not his best work, but Savini on autopilot is still Savini, which means that the effects could still run circles around the dime store VFX artists of whatever the hell else came out in 1986 (which includes Sorority House Massacre and Killer Party - not exactly firm competition. Supple, maybe. But not firm.)

On the other hand, we have Dennis Hopper. Though nobody who's ever seen a single work of cinema would consider his performance "great" (unless, that is, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is that single work of cinema), he brings a focused lunacy to the role that is captivating. This is a character that exists in quite a different universe than the rest of the film, brandishing chainsaws and screaming epithets at nobody in particular, oftentimes while standing alone in locations quite far from the action. He throws himself into the role headfirst, shaking up every idea one might have about the craft of filmmaking for better or for worse.

It's a legitimately tough call on that one.

So really, there's a lot to like about the film. However, it loses major points for its frequent reverting to tried and true story beats and the slower moments are a mite too slow, dragging the film like a half-open parachute. And although there's plenty to chew on about the effects of Vietnam and long-term poverty, the political fire isn't in Hooper's eyes as much as it was when he was 12 years younger.

But in spite of all that, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is a rousing success, plying the audience with legitimately great performances of iconic characters, legitimately ludicrous performances from a well-known actor, and enough Savini-honed nightmare fuel to keep the whole thing going down smoothly.

Killer: Leatherface (Bill Johnson) & Co. Pretty much everybody kills everybody else.

Final Girl: Stretch (Caroline Williams)

Best Kill: Buzz proves that his name is appropriate by getting his skull cap sawed off.

Sign of the Times: A picture can say a thousand words. Two pictures can prove my point.

Scariest Moment: Leatherface lunges at Stretch from the station's record vault.

Weirdest Moment: Leatherface puts L.G.'s face on Stretch and ballroom dances with her in a meat locker.

Champion Dialogue: "Oh great grandma in chainsaw heaven, please don't hoodoo the boy."

Body Count: 8; Although y'all know several of them ain't gonna stick.

1. Buzz gets the top of his head sliced off with a chainsaw.
2. Rick "The Prick" is killed in a car crash.
3. L. G. is bashed in the head with a hammer and has his skin removed.
4. Drayton gets his butt chainsawed and blows himself up with a grenade offscreen.
5. Leatherface is chainsawed in the stomach and blown up with a grenade offscreen.
6. Lefty is blown up with a grenade offscreen.
7. Grandpa is blown up with a grenade offscreen.
8. Chop-Top is sliced in the torso with a chainsaw and falls into a turbine.

TL;DR: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is perhaps even more insane than the first film, though absolutely not as effective.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1861

Reviews In This Series
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Hooper, 1986)
Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (Burr, 1990)
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (Henkel, 1994)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Nispel, 2003)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (Liebesman, 2006)
Texas Chainsaw 3D (Luessenhop, 2013)
Leatherface (Bustillo & Maury, 2017)