Face-Off: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 vs. Texas Chainsaw 3D

TEXAS CHAINSAW 3D picks up immediately after the ending of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, but the continuity is all scrambled up. Ignoring the fact that the first movie was set in 1973, this one shifts the timeline forward – the first character we see is a police officer who drives up to a nice recreation of the TCM house in a vehicle from 1986. The cannibal family is given the name Sawyer, lifted from TCM2 even though the events of that film are ignored, and here we're told that “The Cook” Drayton is Leatherface's father instead of his brother. Holed up in the house and ready to fight the authorities are more Sawyers than we ever knew existed, as apparently the guys from the first film had family members who would stop by for visits and didn't mind the cannibalism and animal bone decorations. Within the first 10 minutes vigilantes have wiped out every Sawyer present except for Leatherface and a baby. Jump ahead twenty-some years, and circumstances are going to bring those two survivors back in contact with each other.

We don't get to see a whole lot of Leatherface interacting with family members (that he's aware of) in this film. We have the Sawyers at the beginning ready to give him up to the police, as long as he gets a good lawyer. After they're mowed down, he goes off to live with his mother, who has married a wealthy man and resides in a mansion. I have trouble believing that the woman who gave birth to Leatherface could accomplish such a thing. Leatherface lives in an area beyond the locked wine cellar, and it's stocked with hooks, flesh masks, and chainsaws. When he first crosses paths with the heroine of this film, he's out to kill her like anybody else – until he realizes she's a relative. He won't harm his own blood.

TEXAS CHAINSAW 3D's heroine was born Edith Rose Sawyer, but we come to know her as Heather Miller. A glimpse into her daily life implies that she has naturally inherited some Sawyer traits; she works in the meat department of a supermarket and creates art out of animal bones. When she learns that a grandmother she never knew about (Leatherface's mom) has passed away and left her a mansion, she goes to check the place out with a group of friends. Here we learn that Heather is also an idiot, as she leaves a hitchhiker alone in her fancy new house and gets her pals killed because she neglects to read a note that informs her of the chainsaw-wielding cousin living behind the wine cellar. Once she learns what happened to the Sawyers, she's easily able to get over the murders and sides with Leatherface. Her friends did suck, but what about all the other people the Sawyers killed? That's a lot to overlook.
 

Leatherface has quieted down a lot since the original; the screaming and babbling he did in that one aren't really present, not even in the scene that's set right after the first movie. He's in silent slasher mode most of the time, knocking off Heather's friends and getting revenge on the vigilantes who wiped out his family. He starts off as the monster in the basement, but by the end he's sort of a stoic, badass anti-hero. We're supposed to be completely on his side and cheer when Heather slides his chainsaw to him and tells him to “do this thing.” 
 

This doesn't have the level of gore that CHAINSAW 2 had, but it's no slouch. Plenty of meat gets cut in here. Leatherface destroys a guy's head with a tenderizer, drags another guy down stairs with a hook, then hangs him up on another hook. He chops fingers, chainsaws a leg off – even saws a person in half while we watch. A hatchet is put to use, a face is peeled… And it all builds up to the sight of a person being fed into an industrial meat grinder. There's some bad CGI in the mix to spoil things, but for the most part I appreciate the bloodshed.