The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986, directed by Tobe Hooper) was always likely to be a fiasco over and above the inevitable comparisons to the unrepeatable original film. It was a troubled, unstable production, one whose budget ebbed and flowed depending on the box office of whatever films the feckless Cannon Films had in theaters at the time. Tobe Hooper was a reluctant director who originally intended only to produce the film before landing in the director's chair when no suitable director could be found for the money producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus were willing to pay. Golan and Globus wanted a very different film from what Hooper wanted to make, too, and were horrified when he delivered not the intense bloodbath they expected, but rather a pitch black comedy. Even so, Hooper leaned into the original film's unearned reputation for extreme violence, resulting in a film that had to either accept an X-rating from the MPAA or go out unrated. Cutting the film wasn't even in the discussion. The film's problems with censors were a worldwide mountain to climb. Cannon was stuck with marketing a film it did not like or understand, but even so the teaser trailer was killer ("After ten years of silence, the buzz is back!") and the one-sheet was hilarious. Critics, like the producers, expected something else and excoriated the film for it.
And yet...somehow, the film managed to make a profit in its original theatrical run and slowly developed a cult following on home video. Rob Zombie has been trying to reverse engineer the film for years with indifferent results. For myself? The first time I saw it I knew it had more on its mind than its sick jokes and elaborate gore gags--though the sick jokes and elaborate gore gags were occasionally inspired. To quote another cult film from the 80s: it had a philosophy
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