The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, November 3-December 6
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)
Directed by Tobe Hooper
Hooper’s most personally impersonal film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is less a sequel than a complete inversion of his chilling 1974 landmark. He reached his hand into the guts of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and, like a grim cartoon, pulled its guts out through its mouth. That unsightly blemish left by capitalist greed is now a massive tumor. Those bruises and cuts left by a president’s illegal war, they’re now punctured, bleeding organs, leaking gallons of blood thanks to a carnival barker cannibal who looks just like that president. Texas Chainsaw 2 is a mega church of degradation and depravity, a fire sale of punishing, extremist values and tribalism, dogma unleashed. An industrial underworld given over to the lunacy of the powerful. You can scream and run, or you can fight. Choose wisely. Scout Tafoya (December 3, 9:30pm; December 6, 7pm; December 9, 7:15pm at Anthology Film Archives’s “Dark Hopper”)