It’s never a surprise to see a horror sequel turn out badly. The Friday 13th , Psycho, and Nightmare on Elm Street series all suffered from terribly scripted and poorly acted sequels that were often just an excuse to cash in on an established format. Indeed it’s still going on with a reportedly lacklustre ‘Freddy vs. Jason’ film due to hit our screens early next year. But it’s not obviously impossible to produce a decent horror sequel. Sam Raimi did it with the Evil Dead trilogy (though the third is perhaps a little too comedy-based), and Wes Craven has had some success in the sequel genre, so, despite many misgivings, I approached this film with some hope.

And perhaps it’s because I love the first movie so much that made me despise this piece of filmic trash. Tobe Hooper’s film was packed with tension, a constantly disturbing soundtrack, and characters that were all too real. Chainsaw III is strictly genre trash, packed with cliched characters and bizarre events that often fail to add up. It tries to copy the original so hard, but changes the very tone of the original movie. In the original much of the soundtrack of the last half is the roar of Leatherface's chainsaw mixed with the terrified screams of the main protagonist, which helped add to it’s uniquely terrifying tone – this sadly has nothing even slightly as inventive as that, and whilst the screams and the roars are still present, they’re often intercut with terrible dialogue and big action scenes which just aren’t that interesting.

Perhaps the worst problem with this film is how the central characters seem somehow immortal. One of the joys of the first film was how quickly certain characters were dispatched, how helpless the protagonists were, but in Chainsaw III the lead male, a big black guy conveniently carrying a large arsenal of weapons, is maimed time and time again, but still manages to pop up at the end and save the day, making the film sadly even more trivial and tedious. All in all, there’s just no reason for this film to exist, as it’s just a copy of the original with inane crap added. One of the worst films of all time, full stop.

Alex Finch