Talk:Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III

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The continuity of this fim seems puzzling, but apparently it treats parts 1-2 as sort of urban legends based on the incoherent ravings of Sally Hardesty.

http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Lot/8885/LEATHERF.TXT

BLACK SCREEN - ROLL CRAWL:

                  ON AUGUST 18TH, 1973, SALLY HARDESTY WAS TOURING
                  RURAL TEXAS WHEN SHE AND A GROUP OF FRIENDS FELL
                  AFOUL OF A BIZARRE, CANNIBALISTIC CLAN OF SERIAL
                  PREDATORS.  MS. HARDESTY WAS THE SOLE SURVIVOR OF
                  THE NIGHT OF TERROR THAT ENSUED.  SHE DIED IN A
                  HEALTH CARE FACILITY IN 1977.

                  A SINGLE MEMBER OF THE MURDEROUS "FAMILY" LIVED TO
                  SEE TRIAL.  THE PROSECUTION RECORDED HIS NAME AS
                  W.E. SAWYER.  HE DIED IN THE GAS CHAMBER AT
                  HUNTSVILLE STATE PENITENTIARY IN LATE 1981.

                  THE JURORS CONCLUDED THAT "LEATHERFACE," PRESUMED TO
                  BE AN UNAPPREHENDED KILLED, WAS IN FACT AN ALTERNATE
                  PERSONALITY OF SAWYER'S, ACTIVATED WHENEVER HE
                  DONNED A CRUDE FACE MASK FASHIONED FROM THE FLESH OF
                  HIS VICTIMS.  NONE OF SALLY HARDESTY'S TESTIMONY
                  EVER CONTRADICTED THIS CONCLUSION.

                  IF THERE WAS NO LEATHERFACE IN REALITY, THEN SALLY
                  HARDESTY MAY AT LAST REST IN PEACE, HER DEATH DULY
                  AVENGED.

                  IF THERE ACTUALLY WAS A LEATHERFACE, HE REMAINS AT
                  LARGE, AND THE SO-CALLED "TEXAS CHAINSAW
                  MASSACRE" ...

                                           ... WAS ONLY THE BEGINNING.

http://www.1000misspenthours.com/reviews/reviewsn-z/leatherfacethetexaschainsawmassacreiii.htm

Screenwriter David J. Schow begins by taking the most sensible approach imaginable to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2: he pretends it never happened. On the other hand, he also seems to proceed upon the assumption that the first film didn’t happen quite the way we remember it, either, and that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre presents a somewhat garbled version of Sally Hardesty’s run-in with the notorious cannibal family. Leatherface’s opening crawl reveals that Sally died in a mental hospital some four years after her ordeal, and that the crimes she endured were eventually blamed on a man named W. E. Sawyer. The state’s attorney convinced a jury that Sawyer had a second personality, one which emerged only when he donned a crude, hand-made leather mask, and that this second personality— Leatherface— was responsible for the murder of Sally’s friends and brother, and very nearly responsible for the murder of Sally herself. The girl’s report of an entire family of killers was presumably dismissed as the product of her own unstable mental condition in the aftermath of the attack. Sawyer was executed in 1981, bringing the whole ugly story to as beneficent a close as was possible under the circumstances.

I also found it very interesting that Schow has written the new family in such a way that it becomes possible to see them as the “real” people on whom the various cannibal killers in the previous movies were “based.” If we accept (as I think was Schow’s intention) this movie’s predecessors as a sort of urban legend that sprang up around the activities of the family as presented here, then certain natural parallels between these family members and the others come to light: the legend turns Alfredo into the hitchhiker, Captain Hook and Tex blend to become Paul/Choptop, the mother takes on other elements of Hook’s personality and then divides to become Drayton Sawyer and the embalmed grandmother, and Grandpa’s preserved corpse changes in the retelling to become a living but unfathomably ancient man kept just to this side of the grave with the blood of the clan’s victims. It makes the movie cleverly self-referential without being cute and annoying at the same time.

[edit] Change in rating

I changed NC-17 to X in the description. The NC-17 rating didn't come into effect until later that year. I did a paper on the history of the MPAA for a college paper, so I'm pretty familiar with the history of the ratings system. (unsigned post)

This is true, I checked [1] the NC-17 rating didn't start until September 1990, several months after this movie came out.--CJ 05:53, 16 June 2006 (UTC)