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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

(1986)

BANNED IN THE UK

“NEVER PREVIOUSLY RELEASED IN THE UK”

No shit. VHS release

Obviously, TCM2 had problems in the USA (see here) but things were much worse in Britain as the British Board of Film Censors essentially banned it on video and at the cinema. MGM never even bothered releasing TCM2 because the British censor commented:

“… would insist on cutting at least 20 minutes out of it".

The BBFC is a private company based on the Brown Shirts (but a lot more middle class obviously).

TCM2 is now availble on VHS/DVD uncut (from MGM) but I’ve never forgiven those fuckers from stopping me watching a perfectly harmless film. Don’t take the UK banning to mean you could just buy it somewhere without a classification as “unrated”. If you sold or distributed the video you could and would be jailed under the Video Recordings Act and Criminal Justice Act. Don’t doubt it.

I only recently watched the Gruesome Edition (first time I’d ever seen the film -20 years later!) and I didn’t rate it highly compared to the original (which is one of the best horror films ever made). Still, it was an interesting project for Cannon so let’s enjoy it and look at some images!

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What a carve-up

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WHAT A CARVE UP

After a 15-year ban, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is finally getting a UK release. Nick Hasted on the troubled life of a satirical classic

Nick Hasted
Friday September 28, 2001

The Guardian

Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 has been banned in Britain for 15 years. It was never even granted the certificateless, locally licensed release of Hooper's original 1974 landmark in rural charnel-house terror to which it's the sequel. Reviews from its brief, unsuccessful 1986 run on US screens suggested a failed attempt at a comic sequel to what remains the most gruelling film many people have ever seen. More rumour than real, Chainsaw 2 was surely just one more dud made by a director already in decline.

But finally seeing this almost forgotten work last month was shocking in a way you don't expect. This was not some lame cash-in, but a last flowering of the satirical, red-raw horror cinema Hooper helped invent.

Joe D'Morais, of film distributors Blue Dolphin, who was also involved in the original Massacre's release and its reissue last year, explains the delay: "James Ferman, the head of the BBFC till last year, had a major problem with the first film. He said he'd never pass it. I never really found out why. Chainsaw 2 gained a reputation for incredible gore, but compared to other films that were around at the time, which was in the days of the video nasty purge, it's nothing. When Robin Duval replaced him at the BBFC, he said the first film had been maligned. And Chainsaw 2 went straight through."

The 12-year gap before Hooper even made the sequel to his savage debut is evidence of a complex story. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre had been hacked out in 32 days of intense work in Hooper's home town of Austin, by local actors and technicians suffering 100-degree heat, on a set stinking of rotting meat. By the end they weren't even being paid, just promised a cut of eventual profits instead. But as the film became a box-office phenomenon, the shadiness of its financing - thanks to rumoured mob involvement - was apparent. Hooper had made enough for "a decent sports car", as he put it, from his work on it by 1982, but everyone involved stayed resentful and fractious, until Hooper found himself under contract at 1980s studio Cannon. He was given two big-budget films (Lifeforce [1985] and Invaders from Mars [1986], both flops), on the condition he made another Massacre.

As the original investors regrouped, hoping for a payday at last, and Cannon booked 1,800 screens for a film that didn't yet exist, Hooper contacted the veteran Texan screenwriter LM "Kit" Carson, fresh from co-writing Paris, Texas and Jim McBride's Breathless remake. Friends of Carson warned him the job would wipe him "off the serious screenwriter's map". But he remembered being unable to finish watching the original, so close was it to "real madness". He signed up.

"The first thing I told Tobe was, 'You're going to have to find the right victims,'" he recalls. "One of the things the first movie had going for it was that people were really sick of hippies and enjoyed seeing a Volkswagen full of 'em squashed. So, I went home to Dallas and went to the Galleria, which is a yuppie feeding ground. I saw all these yuppies buying piles of things, seven sweaters at a time. I called Tobe up and said, 'I've found the victims."'

Published excerpts from Carson's screenplay are full of sneering references to "teen-yups" and "gourmet yuppettes", fodder for working-class cannibal Leatherface in a series of gruesome set pieces. But Hooper planned something nastier than a "horror comedy". He wanted his audience to experience "guilty laughter" as the yuppie-count bloodily rose, "to schiz right out, make themselves feel unsafe and questionable as moral beings".

Hooper had at first only intended to oversee the production. But, weeks before it began, he realised there was only one suitable director. "It looked like fun at the onset. That isn't how it turned out."

Furious thunderstorms drove the production inside the abandoned Austin newspaper building that would double as Leatherface's lair. But the worst horrors came, once again, from the film's financiers.

"Cannon Films treated Tobe horribly," its female lead, Caroline Williams, remembers. "They were constantly second-guessing him, looking over his shoulder, pulling money, giving money. The film that was written and shot was a wonderful satire. Then they got hold of it, and just fucked it up." First to go were most of Carson's gleeful yuppie carve-ups, blunting his attack on the 1980s.

Hooper finally moved on. But as sequel rights slipped from one corporation to the next, the Austin partners who had made the original followed, still chasing their elusive reward, in a strange saga which refuses to end.

Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III was made in 1989, The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1995. Both were routinely banned in Britain. Lawyer Robert Kuhn had jostled his way to dominance of the partners by the latter movie, commenting: "We have a vested interest in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre".

Somehow, the nightmare Hooper created in 1974 remains stronger than such mercenary aims. The second sequel assaults the 1980s family as ruthlessly as the first did yuppies; Return kept things savage and weird. But neither matches Hooper's crazed parting shot. As Leatherface's director Jeff Burr says: "Everyone admits number two was from another planet."

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is released next Friday.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

original article http://film.guardian.co.uk/censorship/news/0,,660431,00.html

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1st release North America DVD (1).	1st release North America DVD	Advertising misc

Australia DVD	B&W still	Bill Johnson, Leatherface

figures	France DVD	France home video

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France VHS	Germany bootleg VHS	Germany DVD (1)

Germany DVD (2)	Germany DVD (3)	Germany DVD (4)

Holland VHS.	Italy DVD	Italy VHS

Japan Laserdisc	Japan poster	Japan.

Leatherface	misc 1	newspaper clipping 1

newspaper clipping 2	newspaper clipping 3	newspaper clipping 4.

newspaper clipping 5	Onset - SFX pictures	photos 1

promo photo 1	promo photo 2	Anchor Bay special edition USA mini-gallery

Spain video	Turkey poster.	UK DVD 1st release

USA DVD 2^nd release (Gruesome Edition)	USA DVD photo (Gruesome Edition)	USA poster (folded large).

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