The critical and box office failure of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) should have brought the misadventures of the newly named Sawyer clan to a close but the rights to the title and characters were snapped up by New Line Cinema who saw in its cast of grotesques, particularly the macabre Leatherface, a chance to start up a new franchise to sit alongside it’s a Nightmare on Elm Street series. Leatherface was promoted to lead character, his name put up in lights as part of the title, and a new script written by splatterpunk author David J. Schow, one which completely ignored the events of the second film, though Caroline Williams gets a very brief, uncredited cameo as Stretch, now a television reporter. Jeff Barr, director of the horror anthology From a Whisper to a Scream (1987) and the slasher sequel Stepfather II (1989) was tapped to direct and New Line thought their fledgling franchise was off to a flying start. They were in for a shock.
Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III ran into all sorts of problems with the MPAA, the American censor board, and the resulting film was compromised by cuts made to secure the commercially vital ‘R’ rating (the MPAA originally rated it ‘X’, a kiss of death for non-porn films). Then to add to New Line’s woes. It failed to click with fans or general audiences and tanked at the box office – it was the worst performing film in the series so far, a dubious title eventually wrested from it by the feeble follow-up Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995).
Young couple Michelle (Kate Hodge) and Ryan (William Butler) are travelling through Texas and call in at the Last Chance Gas Station where they are disturbed by the creepy owner, Alfredo (Tom Everett) and helped by a friendly hitchhiker named Tex (a pre–fame Viggo Mortensen). When Alfredo turns a shotgun on them, the couple flee, seeing Tex apparently killed as her tries to cover their escape. They are later menaced by a pick-up truck and by the chainsaw-wielding Leatherface (R.A. Mihailoff) before they team up with a a survivalist, Benny (Ken Foree). Tex turns out to not only be alive but to be one of the deranged Sawyer clan who now also count among their number his other brothers Alfredo and Tink (Joe Unger), a little girl (Jennifer Banko) and a wheelchair-bound matriarch (Miriam Byrd Nethery) who speaks through a voice synthesizer. Ryan is slaughtered for the family’s next meal at which the bound and terrified Michelle is the very unhappy special guest.
Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (an unwieldy title that can’t have helped the film’s box office prospects) wastes a lot of talent on a film that was so intent on kick-starting a new franchise that all involved lost sight of what it was that made the original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) such a remarkable achievement. No-one from the original film was involved in any way and although Schow is a fine writer with many impressive novels and short stories to his name, he fails to rise to the occasion here. His script reads at times like an above average piece of fan fiction, slavishly regurgitating situations and lookalike characters from the original when a bold new direction was called for. This isn’t a problem confined to Schow – the entire Chainsaw franchise is one of very few creative chances taken, one that’s so in awe of its originator (not at all surprising really) that it can’t find a way to do anything new with the characters.
There are traces here and there of Schow’s black sense of humour – that armadillo from the first film finally gets it in one of the film’s most distressing moments and there’s a knowing reference to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) which, like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, was inspired by the life and crimes of the “Wisconsin ghoul” Ed Gein – but New Line were determined to rein in the anarchic humour of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 in favour of what they announced would be a return “to hard-core horror.” Sadly what they got was a generic slasher, devoid of the queasy atmosphere of the original film or the over-the-top hysteria of its first sequel. It’s slickly made, mostly well acted and isn’t by any means a terrible film – it’s just a bit… ordinary. There’s little here to differentiate it from any number of similar films from the time.
Leatherface (played by his third actor in his third mask) could very easily be exchanged for any other screen psycho for all the impact he makes here. Leatherface tended to work best when he was the terrified and bewildered runt of the Sawyer litter, a hulking outcast and whipping boy for his demented family. Here he’s more assertive, more likely to take charge and as a result more generic. Mihailoff (stunt doubled by Kane Hodder who also played another fan-favourite screen psycho, Jason Vorhees in the Friday the 13th films) gets nothing like that remarkable moment in the first film when Gunnar Hansen’s Leatherface sits quietly after slaughtering the first two intruders into his home, his eyes expressing utter confusion and dismay at the turn of events. This Leatherface is sadly just another horror movie serial killer, relentless and seemingly unstoppable.
Another hallmark of the franchise is the extraordinary number of family members that come and go as the series progresses. Leatherface is the only constant and in various iterations of the series we’ve seen the clan grow from a twisted nuclear family to what feels like a small community all living under the same roof in later films. Here we get a whole new set of characters that have sprung out of nowhere with no explanation – the brothers, Tex and Tink, are analogues of the Hitchhiker and Chop Top from the earlier films but without any of the charisma or untrammelled insanity. The never-named little girl (who in truth is just a generic creepy kid with a doll) may be Leatherface’s daughter though it’s never really clear who she is and the boys and girl suddenly have a never-seen-before mother. Later films would introduce ever more family members, a sign that no-one involved in the franchise and its various reboots had the faintest idea what to do with it.
The film was, deservedly, a box office flop and is still not well regarded by fans or critics. Far worse was still to come and at least Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III looks good though it’s the sort of film you’re likely to forget the minute it’s over, never to return to again. It’s hard to quantify exactly what it was that made the original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre so memorable, to accurately pinpoint the qualities that make it so unsettling and deliriously entertaining all these decades later. All that we can say for certain is that whatever those qualities are, Leatherface has none of them.
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