Skip to main content

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 Or If You Can't Fuck, Kill.

Like any good horror fan, I love the original "Texas Chainsaw Massacre". Not only a fantastic horror flick but, a seminally important one to the horror genre, TCM is one of my all-time favorite movies. But today, I'll be ranting about a different animal altogether: the sequel.

"Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2" is a comment on gender politics, the nature of sexuality, and how these concepts are taught to us at home (by our families, however bizarre they may be).

As I've talked a bit about in other blogs, psychos and sociopaths have issues with human interaction and thus lack any relationship skills or experience. But these human monsters still have carnal urges and when they are faced with those urges and their inability to fulfill them, they kill.

"Monsters" aren't socially allowed to have relationships and therefore are terribly, sexually frustrated.

When Leatherface has Stretch cornered in the radio station, she initially fears he'll kill her. But once he has his giant chainsaw between her legs - proving his desire to have sex with her - she realizes this and attempts to seduce him (distracting him from killing her). When her terror (which he understands) dissolves into sexuality (which he doesn't understand) he becomes confused and frustrated and cannot complete the act.

Unable to to fuck or kill, he uses his chainsaw to destroy the station in an impotent rage.

And as if this statement isn't clear enough, it's followed by a stereotypically male scene in which Leatherface is confronted by his brother who keeps asking if Leatherface has "gotten that bitch, good." to which Leatherface emphatically indicates that he did; bragging about a conquest that he can barely understand, let alone have made.

And take Stretch herself: victimized by a family of men, her final act is to emasculate them and wield their power (or giant chainsaw) for herself. If this doesn't scream, "women's lib!" and "gender equality", well then I don't know what does.

Okay. Pausing the pseudo-feminist interpretation for a moment, the other take on the movie is that everything is just surface value and is simply about the thrill of hacking other people to pieces with chainsaws.

So, now that we're off the gender rant, let's talk about a truly interesting twist: somehow the most classically out-of-control actor of the era (Dennis Hopper) looks contained compared to Bill Moseley's rambling performance.

Wrap up time.
Any smart filmgoer can read subtext into a movie. Does that mean it's real? Well, as one of my favorite sayings goes, "It's the truth, even if it didn't happen."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Rebuttal: 17 Disturbing Horror Movies You Will Never Watch Again

When I'm not watching movies, I'm reading about movies. I stumble across all kinds of articles, blog posts, book excerpts, etc. in my quest to absorb as much movie knowledge as possible. Now, I'm snotty and loud-mouthed and opinionated but I'd never begrudge another human their opinion. Seriously. You're absolutely welcome to have any opinion about any thing you want. However, I must warn you, if I think your opinion is stupid, I'm absolutely going to say so. I've recently stumbled on an article completely  brimming with so many idiotic opinions that I'm actually compelled to craft a response. Here's the gist of the original article: there are some horror movies out there that are so disturbing , you'll only ever want to watch them once. I've have taken her original list and refuted her claims without pulling her entire article over. You can read the original article here . Let's start at the beginning, with her opening statement

What Is Genre And Why Should I Care?

There are terms that always seem to come up when talking about films: director, actor, plot, theme, score, etc. These terms are all self-explanatory; no one ever asks, ‘what’s a director?’ However, there are other terms that are equally common but less clear: genre, sub-genre, auteur, oeuvre, etc. These terms are more abstract then ‘director’ or ‘actor.’ It is entirely likely that someone will ask, ‘what is genre, anyway?’ This question specifically is what I will be answering with this paper. The answer to the question ‘what is genre,’ is multi-layered: genre is a means of classification. Genre is a means of communication. Genre is a means of understanding films. Genre is a means of relating to films. To one person all movies rated “PG” are a genre – possibly one also known as “children’s movies” – while to another all movies with similar topics treated in similar ways are a genre: i.e. movies dealing with frontier life depicted in a nostalgic manner are a genre often kn

Contracted Or I Just Watched A Zombie Movie

Seems like horror fans fall into two buckets these days: zombie lovers and zombie haters. That dividing line just keeps getting deeper and darker the more zombies gain "mainstream popularity". I currently fall into the "I am so tired of zombies I could puke" bucket. I haven't stopped  watching zombie movies so much as I've started avoiding them at all costs, literally watching every other subgenre offering I stumble onto, regardless of how terrible it is. I seriously re-watched Wishmaster  this past week. That's how far out of my way I've been going to avoid the significant number of zombie movies flooding Netflix. Then I accidentally watched one. Contracted - 2013 I'm sure it was partially due to the really terrible movie synopsis that Netflix provided, which I'm prepared to admit that they may have nothing to do with and  that I likely didn't read it very well. In a strange twist of events, the movie cover actually helped