Texas 3: The Saw is Family

Maire says:

Remember how The Exorcist II really had nothing to do with The Exorcist? Texas 2 is sort of in the same boat, except that it’s actually good.

So here we are with Texas III, which tries to pick up after Texas 1. And then it falls into the 3rd in the series trap. It wants to be good. You want it to be good. But somewhere along the line we all realize that it’s not going to be great. In fact, it’s not even going to be good. But we soldier on anyhow, and are we rewarded for our efforts?

Well, Ken Foree is stellar as always. And hey, isn’t that Viggo Mortensen? Oh, it is! But alas, despite the gore and tension, the end just really goes to schlock. So no, we’re not rewarded for our efforts, but I hear there are some big names in 4, so it’s sure to be great, right?


Corey says:

I could take this entire review and talk about how awesome the trailer for this movie is.  Instead, here it is. Ok, now you’ve seen the best part of Texas 3.  That being said, 3 has its merits.  For one, it’s got Ken “No More Room in Hell” Foree in it, which I think is pretty neat.  He seems like a nice guy, and he gets into quite arguably the best duke-it-out-with-Leatherface-while-a-chainsaw-dances-in-the-water-in-the-background scene ever put to celluloid.

Other than that, the fun in 3 is few and far between.  Viggo “dont call me Strider, dammit” Mortensen does a pretty good job of trying to fill the wacky brother role of the family, but everybody else feels too goofy and watered down.  None of the other family members (even you, Bubba) don’t have distinct enough personalities to allow you to figure out which wacko is which.  And why is there a fucking kid?  Who’s idea was that?

Movie Exec: “You know what would be creepy?  A wacko kid!  That’d be an awesome twist!”

Oh.

One of the standouts of this film was the soundtrack.  This bad boy is just dripping with late 80’s crap metal everywhere, and I fucking love it.  Hell, Sacred Reich is on there! I haven’t thought about them since I was wearing big stupid pants and had blue hair.  In fact, them being on there kind of sums of this film nicely.  Texas 3, unfortunately, was a product of the times it lived it.  It reeks of late 80’s/early 90’s stereotypes and how to fit the venerable series into those tropes.  If the first two films hadn’t been so groundbreaking, this might not be a problem.  But they were, so it is.

Salty says:

While The Texas Chainsaw Massacre bears the distinction of being one of the most imitated original horror films of all time and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 bears the personal distinction of being my favorite movie of all time, Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III’s main distinction is that it has one of my favorite theatrical trailers of all time. I think that theatrical trailers are an art unto themselves; there are trailers that use little to no footage from the film (Pink Flamingos), trailers that don’t use any dialogue so you won’t know that they are foreign (Don’t Open the Window) and trailers don’t really relate to the film at all (Videodrome), but the best trailers are the ones that use original footage – stuff that you don’t even get in the movie. The Leatherface trailer is one of the latter, and oh boy is it a doozy! Just go watch it.

As for the film itself, Texas III is not bad (not bad does not mean good). The story is familiar: two siblings (neither of them blowing raspberries) on a cross-Texas adventure meet up with the family of chainsaw killers with a lot of obvious fodder along the way – only now the family is different. Drayton is way off, and the wacky hitchhiker is now much less crazy Viggo Mortenson (who does not wear a Sonny Bono wig). They decided to try to humanize Leatherface with this sad awkward Speak-and-Spell scene (a digital picture of a clown is not food - good name for a song by The Locust; bad way to tell me that Leatherface is mentally handicapped). Plus, grandpa is dead (really dead, it’s not that he just looks dead this time) and now we have… smoking post-tracheotomy grandma and… a little cannibal girl, both of whom are presented without explanation, and this leaves the film feeling a lot iffier.

The movie overall is a toss-up between the decent (kitchen scenes) and the lame (Did you know that if you drop a running chainsaw in the swamp, it will not only continue to run, but wave itself back and forth in the water? I may be crazy, but I suspect that this won’t actually happen.) and as it is so often in life, mediocrity wins.

Maire	Corey	Salty
☆	☆☆	☆☆