Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990)

Director: Jeff Burr
Writer: David J. Schow, based on characters created by Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper
Stars: Kate Hodge, Viggo Mortensen, William Butler, Ken Foree, Joe Unger, Tom Everett, Toni Hudson, Miriam Byrd-Nethery and R. A. Mihailoff

Index: Make It a Double.

I seem to meet a lot of actors who starred in Texas Chainsaw flicks, most of whom don’t pick them for their Doubles. Ken Foree did and so did R. A. Mihailoff, both of them picking III, so I’ll get to review it twice before tackling 2 for Bill Johnson. Nobody so far has picked the first and best, not even Gunnar Hansen.

For those new to the franchise, the first was an indie film in 1974 with a cast of unknowns. Contrary to its provocative title, it features no sex, no gore, no swearing and very little blood, but it still carries an immense impact through bones and screams. It’s a freaky, scary feature. The second, released in 1986, is wildly over the top, an acid trip of a black comedy dressed in horror clothing. It’s outrageous in many ways but it isn’t scary at all.

This third film aimed to restore scariness to the franchise only four years later and it does a decent job of it, the darker script by horror novelist David J. Schow tying in urban legend and grounding it all in effective locations. He also ignored 2 entirely, providing opening text that only referenced the first film. It’s there to tell us that a member of the cannibal clan saw trial, W. E. Sawyer by name, and he died in the gas chamber. Leatherface, the jury believed, is a persona he wore along with his human flesh mask, so he’s long gone.

Except, of course, this movie says otherwise. We see him cut and stitch a new mask behind the opening credits and presumably that’s his work that Michelle and Ryan pass on the road, a serious crime scene buzzing with reporters as techs in hazmat suits excavate a body pit. It may hold forty or fifty bodies, they believe.

This is already far more grounded and more believably horrific than the entire hour and a half of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. And then they meet Viggo Mortensen. Yes, that one. I’d forgotten that he started out in Witness but he was still paying his dues a decade before being cast in The Lord of the Rings.

He’s weird but charming here, a hitch-hiker just wanting to get home. He can’t talk Ryan into giving him a lift from the Last Chance gas station but he does show him a shortcut that will get him to Houston quicker and he stops the pervert attendant from spying on Michelle in the bathroom, getting shot for his trouble as they peel off down the road.

That pervert attendant is Alfredo, it seems, and he’s precisely the sort of backwoods yokel you don’t want to fill up your car. He’s cutting bits of girls out of a magazine when they pull up. Then he scares Michelle so he can capture her fright on polaroid to sell to her in a frantic accent. He was creepy even before he peeped at her through the hole in the bathroom wall.

Everything here is creepy, not just the body pit and the Last Chance. In fact, the only other location at this point is the road and even that has an unexpected armadillo as an obstacle for them to put out of its misery. This isn’t a road trip to remember, it’s a road trip to teleport out of. Unfortunately, it’s also a perfect road trip for a horror movie, so they’re stuck on it and, of course, it’s about to get a lot worse.

After it gets dark, they’re pursued by an evil looking truck; as it passes, the driver hurls the corpse of an animal onto their car and they’re suddenly off the road. Ryan changes a tyre and there’s Leatherface with a revving chainsaw.

The only saving grace in all this is that they soon meet Ken Foree, driving the other way, albeit after they’re both run off the road at the same time, and now there are three of them to battle whatever’s hiding in the Texan night.

It’s pretty clear why Foree chose this film, as there are established rules in horror movies and Benny doesn’t follow any of them. We all know that the black guy dies first. Well, Benny doesn’t die first, even if it initially seems that he might, and he has no intention of dying at all. He’s some sort of survivalist who seems to actually know what he’s doing and those skills serve useful not only for himself but the other travellers caught in the same trap.

I didn’t dislike Michelle or Ryan but I didn’t particularly like them either. They’re the sort of disposable characters that we tend to meet in horror movies. While we might be happy if they make it out alive, we won’t be unhappy if they don’t. Benny I liked. I rooted for him.

This film didn’t do well either with critics or with the moviegoing public, but I rather liked it. It doesn’t do a lot, with few characters and few locations to string a story off, but it does a lot with what little it has. Sure the third act is a credibility stretcher, after the more realistic earlier scenes, at least compared with the film before it, but it’s enjoyable enough.

There are problems though and some can’t be explained away as easily as the lack of gore. There was plenty of that, it seems, courtesy of Bob Kurtzman and Howard Berger, two greats of the industry. However, over four minutes of the more gruesome material was cut in order for the MPAA to approve the film, which was a huge amount, enough to almost sanitise it and more than enough to defeat Schow’s intention to redirect the franchise back to pure horror.

What he managed, even in this cut version—and that’s the one we’re stuck with, given that the cuts were made to the negative itself so as to meet release dates—was to put Leatherface front and centre. He’d already been the face of the franchise, pun not intended, from the very beginning, but he was never in charge.

In the first film, he was just a big dumb kid, clearly mentally disabled, who was born into a family fine with him killing people and using their flesh to make art. In the second, he saves one woman, not out of altruism but probably to keep her as a pet. He’s almost sympathetic.

Here, Schow gives him some real agency for the first time. When his elder brother takes his Walkman and throws it into the fire, he makes him get it back. With his bare hand. The tape’s melted by that point, of course, but that’s not the point. He’s in charge of a moment and it’s clear that it’s not going to be the only one.

I wish I could see this in its original version before it was shredded for the MPAA. It didn’t help, I’m sure, that the studio fired Jeff Burr a week into production then hired him back, or that a wildfire destroyed some of its locations.

However, its creepiness remains. With very little in the way of plot progression and a wide open ending, it needs that badly. Otherwise, it has Benny, a horror movie black guy to break the rules. No wonder Ken Foree picked this.