Census Flashback: Toxic Masculinity

On our Fright Flashback/Census Bloodbath crossover, every week this summer we'll be exploring an 80's slasher film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to the weekend's upcoming blockbuster.

In anticipation of The Incredibles, which weirdly seems to be a remake of Mr. Mom featuring superheroes, I'll be reviewing Stepfather 2: Make Room for Daddy, another sequel with a twisted sense of fatherhood.

Year: 1989

Director: Jeff Burr

Cast: Terry O'Quinn, Meg Foster, Caroline Williams

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

If there's one subgenre and time period in the world that would guarantee a sequel to an even mildly successful film, it was the slasher movie in the 1980's. If we could get a Death Nurse 2 or a Stripped to Kill II: Live Girls, it's certainly not surprising that the 1987 Hitchcockian thriller The Stepfather got a follow-up entry two years later. In fact, nothing is surprising about Stepfather 2: Make Room for Daddy, except the fact that it's maybe even sorta kinda good.

Also, maybe we should arrange another remake with Stanley Tucci, just sayin'.

You may recall that the previous Stepfather ended with the titular family-stealing slasher dying, but since when has that ever stopped a good horror villain? Terry O'Quinn returns to the franchise with a hand-waving scene that reveals he just got a nasty scar from being stabbed in the heart, 'twas only a flesh wound! Anyway, we catch up with him in a psych ward in Puget Sound (a psych ward which has a buzz saw that they let the patients use, because mental health care competency has apparently taken some huge strides between the 80's and now), a location which he easily escapes to build a new life for himself down in Loma Linda, California.

While he makes moves on Carol (Meg Foster), the lovely divorcée across the street, and attempts to assimilate himself into the lives of her and her son Todd (Jonathan Brandis), he must face obstacles to his new nuclear family. These obstacles include Carol's deadbeat ex-husband Phil (Mitchell Lawrence) and the nosy postal worker neighbor Matty (Caroline Williams of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2). 

And who WOULDN'T want to fill the gap in this holy trinity?

By the very nature of being a sequel, Stepfather 2 inherently subverts the plot of the original. Whereas that film was a thriller of domestic paranoia, following Jill Schoelen's efforts to expose the man in her house whom she suspects is a crazy evil killer man, in this film we sure as hell know he's a crazy evil killer man. Thus it becomes almost Psycho III-esque, where the tension transfers from siding with the victims and worrying about their fates to sympathizing with the killer himself. You watch as he attempts to rebuild his life and tie up any loose ends to his perfect marital bliss, and you're biting your knuckles along with him as various wrinkles threaten that delicate balance.

Plus, since the slasher subgenre had gotten more of its claws into the franchise, this is also accompanied by a bump in the body count, easily doubling the previous effort. You won't catch me complaining about that. Although the original Stepfather is certainly one of the more respectable 80's efforts, it's not one that particularly spoke to me, so I don't mind it being beefed up with some popcorn chills and spills.

Mind you, even the improved kill-pacing of this entry still doesn't provide for many particularly memorable murders. Stepfather 2 is a deeply generic slasher through and through, and the well of blood the genre had to offer had long since dried up by 1989. The film demurely hides its gore behind tasteful pans to pools of blood, as if that was what would get the goat of any audience member sitting in the theater for a movie with the subtitle Make Room for Daddy. Stepfather 2's refusal to cop to being a tawdry B-picture prevents it from rising too far above being merely "good," but for 1989, it was probably the best case scenario if we're being honest.

Though the fact that I can't really find a screenshot more eye-catching than this should speak volumes.

All that said, this is probably the best horror film director Jeff Burr ever made (though with the chopped-to-hell Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III kicking it right there on the CV, there's not a ton of competition). There are fun little moments like the neighborhood group therapy that devolves into a catty gossip session, or the Stepfather's quasi-Freddy quips that are funny yet still grounded enough in his character that they don't break whatever reality this film could conjure.

Plus, in the third act Stepfather 2 becomes an actually good film, depicting a wedding chapel battle that sees every piece of the Stepfather's story falling apart in a massive crescendo of confusion as Carol and Todd (who aren't as fleshed-out as they should have been) really coming into their own as a family unit amid a flurry of exciting, well-staged action.

Stepfather 2 isn't really anything more than a generic slasher, but it's like eating a cookie from a box you got at the grocery store. It isn't delicious, but it hits the spot. It checks all the boxes of what a movie like this needs to have, even if it isn't as bloody or as sexy as it could have been.

Killer: The Stepfather (Terry O'Quinn)

Final Girl: Carol Grayland (Meg Foster)

Best Kill: The doctor who gets a shiv in the back of the neck is the only gore moment that in any way feels even next door to showstopping.

Sign of the Times: The Stepfather scouts potential wives using a videotape dating service.

Scariest Moment: In the heat of the moment, Carol makes out with the Stepfather's giant chest scar.

Weirdest Moment: While eating cereal, the Stepfather takes a moment to lean his ear close to the snapping, crackling, and popping and grin to himself.

Champion Dialogue: "He likes me to hum when I kiss him down below."

Body Count: 6

1. Dr. Danvers is shivved in the back of the neck.
2. Smith is bludgeoned with his nightstick.
3. Random Dude has his hands smashed in a trunk and is killed offscreen.
4. Phil is slashed to death with a broken bottle.
5. Matty is strangled with a cloth bathrobe tie.
6. The Stepfather gets the claw end of a hammer buried in his chest.

TL;DR: Stepfather 2: Make Room for Daddy is a surprisingly decent late slasher sequel.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1090
Reviews In This Series
The Stepfather (Ruben, 1987)
Stepfather 2: Make Room for Daddy (Burr, 1989)

Don't Mess With Texas

Year: 1990

Director: Jeff Burr

Cast: Kate Hodge, Ken Foree, R. A. Mihailoff

Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

"They just get dumber and dumber, don't they?"

This line from Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III is meant to be about the victims that wander in the way of the treacherous Sawyer family, but it's quite accurate in describing the franchise itself. It's a true marvel how ineffably, ludicrously dumb the filmmakers in charge of horror sequels tend to be, but the people behind Texas Chainsaw III just about take the cake, ripping continuity to shreds and replacing it with goreless, gibbering claptrap.

Although in retrospect, we all should have seen it coming when New Line Entertainment picked up the property in the late 80's. Sure, it's the company behind the beloved Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, but New Line in the 90's was like quicksand for horror franchises, sucking up everything good about them and spitting out dreadfully bizarre and bizarrely dreadful films like Freddy's Dead and Jason Goes to Hell.

Heck, even the teaser trailer tried to warn us it was a piece of crap.

Texas Chainsaw III "tells" the "story" of Michelle (Kate Hodge) and Ryan (William Butler of Friday the 13th Part VII), an annoying couple who are taking a road trip from LA to Florida by way of Texas. After a run-in at the Last Chance gas station and an unfortunate trunk-chainsawing, they get into an accident on a back road, flipping weekend survivalist Benny's (Ken Foree of From Beyond and Dawn of the Dead) Jeep and sending their own car careening into the forest.

After an interminable amount of Noises Off antics in the forest (up to three crazed hillbilly cannibals and up to four crazed victims appear and vanish between scenes at the whims of some unknown but certainly unmerciful god), Michelle arrives at a house in the woods (for the first and only time shot somewhere other than Texas - in this case Valencia, California though it looks more like the swamp planet Dagobah) just in time for the obligatory dinner party sequence.

As always, our Final Girl (insofar that she survives and is a female) gets to meet the family. And here's where things get hairy. If you recall from my previous entry in this franchise, Part 2 ended with the entire clan being blown up by a grenade and/or chainsawed and tossed into a turbine. I'll give the filmmakers a pass on bringing back Leatherface (R. A. Mihailoff) because a beloved franchise does need its main villain. But evidently the Sawyer family is like a Chia pet - just sprinkle some blood and new families will sprout around you, as many as you want!

You want three new brothers? Sure thing! Here's Tex (a pre-Aragorn Viggo Mortensen), Tinker (Joe Unger), and Alfredo (Tom Everett), each more unexciting and derivative than the last. You want Grandpa back? No problem! Here's his corpse to tide you over. You want a little girl (Jennifer Banko) in spite of the fact that there's no possible combination of sexually healthy humans in the film that could have borne her from their coition? You want a Mama (Miriam Byrd-Nethery) in a wheelchair with an electrolarynx? Screw you, you lunatic, but you got it!

The true modern family.

I haven't even mentioned that the family now lays traps in the woods like they're the frickin' Most Dangerous Game of the American Southwest and that Leatherface now has a leg brace as well as the ability to drive. Not to mention the film completely overestimates the importance of the chainsaw, elevating it to totemic power within the family.

For all this we're given no explanation. No delicate tiptoeing around continuity. Not even a gentle nod. The new world order for the Sawyers simply exists. And your ability to enjoy this movie is contingent on your ability accept this turn of events. But hey. I'm an easygoing horror fan.

I've laughed my way through Jason's dead child body teleporting from the New York sewers back to being a full-grown man at Crystal Lake. I've endured Freddy Krueger miraculously sprouting a wife and daughter and being given his dream powers by ancient worm demons. I've cheerily skipped through Michael Myers' induction into the Cult of Thorn. 

But Texas Chainsaw III just plain pisses me off. It's one thing to make a dumb horror sequel. It's another to create a film that dares to spit in the face of continuity itself, then devotes all its resources to a slavish imitation of the aesthetic of the original film, all the way down from the heat dripping off the frame to the insert shots of the sun to the armadillo in the road. And then attempts to dispel any potential claims of plagiarism by sticking earrings on that armadillo.

The cherry on top? That doll is named Sally.

This is infuriating to any hard-won fan of the franchise. But if one could manage the Herculean task of looking past that anger and being completely objective... The movie still is a piece of crap. But at the very least an amiably daffy piece of crap.

This is the first film where the acting slips below the slasher threshold, landing firmly in camp territory. Mihailoff's Leatherface is supremely unimpressive either way you slice it (be it chainsaw or what have you), but Mortensen's Tex is a delightful nutcase with an accent like slow-churned molasses. And Everett filters the Hitchhiker impression that provides the character of Alfredo through an accent that can only be described as "Elvis with a penny up his nose." And man oh man can Ken Foree be a bad actor when he wants to be, shouting his lines with little to no concern upon whom they fall.

There's just slightly enough gore to wet a neophyte's whistle, though even in the five-minutes-longer unrated cut, the grue is rather subdued. But the hamhanded dialogue more than makes up for it with its Screenwriting 101 tricks (use a random token from Act 1 to pay off a kill in Act 3, mirroring character situations before and after they make a change), which spill out from the screen like a magician's handkerchief.

Or, if you prefer, neckerchief.

And luckily for bad movie enthusiasts, the Final Girl is one of those "shout at the screen" types who always turns back after running seven feet and yells at her boyfriend to hurry up fixing the tire while continuously taking away the flashlight she's holding to aid his repairs. And did I mention that all of this is scored with a soundtrack that feels like a Trapt album run through a garbage disposal?

The finale especially is pure dumb fun, with one moment of humor (Leatherface plays a Leapfrog-style kids' game) that lands with intentionality. And at least two of the deaths are chainsaw related, which is far more uncommon than would seem possible in a franchise that has built its entire mythology around the implement.

So perhaps it's not quite as soul-poisoning as I first made it out to be. But the fact remains that this is the first film in the franchise that outright defaces the original masterpiece with its sheer ineptitude. There's certainly plenty more crap to come, but we must never forget this sad day in 1990 which finally felled the savage beast that is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

TL;DR: Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III is dumb and terrible and spits on continuity but at least it doesn't take itself too seriously.

Rating: 4/10

Body Count: 6; not including an armadillo. Or Benny and Leatherface, who looked rather dead last time I saw them, but were revived without a scratch thanks to tampering from Lucifer the studio.

1. Gina is hit in the head with a sledgehammer.
2. Sara is chainsawed to death.
3. Ryan is chainsawed and hit in the head with a hammer.
4. Mama is shot three times with a shotgun.
5. Tex is stabbed in the back and set on fire.
6. Alfredo is shot in the chest with a shotgun. 

Word Count: 13

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)