the groundhog day project

The opening text crawl for Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III insists on the verisimilitude of this being based on real events. The fact that Norman Bates in Psycho was based on the same guy that inspired Leatherface ought to tell you how real this story is. I’ve only seen this movie once before, I’m pretty sure. I don’t actually remember if Viggo Mortensen’s character is part of the Sawyer clan, but I figure if Strider offers you directions someplace, you should listen. It really only occurred to me now, with only two potential victims present in this film, that Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 was not really a slasher film. There just weren’t enough victims. (And, from what I remember of chainsaws—a family friend from when I was a kid was pretty much a lumberjack, so he has a few—you start them like you do a lawn mower, a little pull cord, and the engine gets going. The noise that you hear when Leatherface comes at Michelle and Ryan when they’re changing the tire is the no...

The original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was released 1 October 1974, but the crawl at the beginning of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 establishes that it happened on 18 August 1973. This one was released 22 August 1986, but is set “14 years” after the original. That isn’t important information, but after yesterday ‘s blog entry, the discrepancy was noticeable for me. What is important to note is that this film doesn’t really seem to be cashing in on the popularity of slasher films. It’s not one of Nowell’s (2011) “carpetbagger cash-ins.” Hell, I’m not sure this film falls within Nowell’s “first teen slasher film cycle” in terms of timing. Looking at the release dates of just the more popular slasher films I’ll be watching this month, I see no real gap from Halloween in ’78 to Halloween H20: 20 Years Later in ’98. That is to say, there’s a 4 year gap between The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in ’74 and the original Halloween , and a gap of four years after H20 to Jason X . I think N...