Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013)

Is there really a reason for making Texas Chainsaw sequels anymore?  Apparently, Platinum Dunes abandoned the series after The Beginning but Twisted Pictures felt it was a great idea to pick it back up again.  I mean, there never really is a shortage of hot girls and their dumbass looking boyfriends willing to poke their noses where they shouldn't be, right?  Of course, Scream Queen is a sucker for both formulaic sequels, and Bill Moseley (who plays Drayton Sawyer in this version for like 5 minutes).  They also brought back a few other actors from the original TCM, including Marilyn Burns (Sally Hardesty), Gunnar Hansen (original Leatherface), and John Dugan (Grandpa).

So what's the shtick this time?  We get a bunch of archive footage from the original movie, and then a whole story of vigilante justice, where Leatherface's house is burned to the ground, along with everyone in it.  In a NOES-esque twist, this now becomes the town's dirty little secret.   In a Halloween-esque twist, we find out that someone was abducted as a baby from fire, and raised as if they weren't related to Leatherface.

Back to present times.  Some hot twenty-somethings, including Trey Songz (Ryan) are going to New Orleans to party it up.  However, Heather (Alexandra Daddario) randomly gets notified that her grandmother died, and since she is the only living relative, she gets a free house.  BOOM!  She didn't even know she had a grandma.  It's her lucky day.  Heather, Ryan, and their two friends pile into the car and swing on down to Texas to claim the house.  They also pick up a hitchhiker because people totally still do that.

The house is bananas and full of expensive stuff and vintage wine.  What could go wrong?  Oh yeah, just Leatherface all old and living in the basement.  Like an unruly pet, apparently he just needs to be contained and fed.   Who knew it was that easy?  Heather did, that's who.  She goes from being a fairly normal chick that makes strange art, to someone that is super-attached to their crazy, murderous family, even encouraging Leatherface to kill the townspeople who still resent him (I wonder why!) 

I actually enjoyed the gore and ridiculousness of most of this flick, but the ending and the Heather character was just so stupid and contrived.  Who just goes from living a totally typical life to egging on a demented murderer and then moving in with him?  I can suspend reality a little for horror movies, but this plot line was just too much.  I hope this is the last of the TCM sequels for a while.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006)

I vaguely remember seeing this movie a few years back, but I can't recall any details about it, and I apparently never wrote a review.  Scream King is sick at the moment, and he's hogging the streaming Netflix in the second bedroom.  Therefore, I'm forced to tread through the mess of free Amazon Prime movies.  I've noted a few horror movies I could get into, and we'll start off with this one.

I actually loved The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake.  It's one of the better remakes that's come out within the past ten years or so, another being The Hills Have Eyes.  Remember Jordana Brewster?  She was such hot shit when The Fast and the Furious came out, and then she sort of just faded into obscurity.  But she's in this movie, trying to live up to Jessica Biel.  So the old meatpacking plant is closed down by the Texas Department of Health, taking away everyone's jobs and essentially killing the town.  Leatherface still wants to work there, though, and they are having a hard time getting him to leave.  In the meantime, a group of four attractive twenty somethings (Jordana Brewster, Taylor Handley, Diora Baird, and Matt Bomer) are heading to drop their boyfriends off for the draft to Vietnam.  Obviously this is a recipe for death, destruction and cannibalism.

Yay, Lew Temple as the sheriff!  He has been popping up in my life at random lately with The Walking Dead and all.  Of course R. Lee Ermey takes him out to gain his rightful place as sheriff, which obviously continues into the original remake.  Okay, good story flow.  We get kind of a repeat of the remake (ha!) as they stop at the same country store and ask to use the bathroom.  There is a gang of bikers this time though.  There's a forced accident and holy crap they are fucked.  At least they don't have a dead body in the car this time.

They get dragged back to the infamous cannibal house, where all kinds of atrocities await.  It seems they need/want the victims for food, but then I get confused as to why they torture them so much.  I mean, I guess there wouldn't be a movie without it.   Attractive co-eds are tied up, cut up, and made to run around the maze-like homestead.  They desperately want to save each other, but we all know how that goes.  I enjoyed how the ending was kind of the antithesis to both the original and the remake, all while linking it together.

Per IMDB, apparently there was never a plan to make this prequel.  But after seeing the remake, fans kept asking questions about how things came to be.  And they made a prequel.  Listen up Rob Zombie -- we want a freakin' House of 1000 Corpses prequel!

The second time around I actually liked this movie.  Maybe because it was much, much like the TCM remake. We like things that are familiar, right?  I'm also kind of a fan of formulas, and the whole TCM series sorta has that down.