I worry at times, will the Italian exploitation industry of the 1980s ever run out of wonders to make me delirious with? Is there a bottom to this well of movie drugs? Well, sure there is, but every time I think I can’t get that high ever again, I put on something like Patrick Still Lives and walk away dazed. Seriously, well done, Mario Landi, you absolute maniac.

Full warning: This is the same lunatic that made Giallo in Venice, so if you think that this is something you can put on to babysit your kids while you do something in the other room, by all means, show your kids a movie where a woman is assaulted by a telekinetic powered poker.

Also, this is totally an unauthorized sequel to the Australian film Patrick, which has no scenes where the wind picks up and a blonde nurse paws at herself in gynecological detail and really, isn’t it a worse movie for it?

“You Need to Know … This Time Patrick Will Kill You!”

Oh man, do I ever.

Gabriele Crisanti produced this movie, along with Giallo in Venice, Savage World Today, Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror and Satan’s Baby Doll. Like any good producer, he put his girlfriend in the film, Mariangela Giordano (she’s the Countess in Killer Barbys, as well as making appearances in The Sect, Decameron n° 4 – Le belle novelle del Boccaccio and many more movies). In both this movie and the aforementioned Giallo in Venice, Giordano dies in ways that would potentially upset even Lucio Fulci. She said later, “Looking back I shouldn’t have done them. But I was in love with Gabriele. I would have done anything for him. Now I can see how the increasingly gruesome ways he had me killed in them was a reflection of the breakdown in our own relationship. This movie is the worst instance of how shocked I was in retrospect by something I’d done on film. That poker scene is so disgusting, so terrible, only Gabriele could have sweet-talked me into actually doing it! It took two days to film that scene, and because the poker had to keep thrusting between my legs before it came out of the top of my head, it got more and more painful as we kept going. And it was cold and freezing. I don’t know why Gabriele always insisted on making these movies during winter.”

This movie has lots of J&B, a better car decapitation than Hereditary, green glowing eyes, women stripping in front of coma patients, strobing lights, more nudity than most pornography, a ridiculous plan, dogs eating people, a scalding, a hook to the neck, a health spa that looks like a foreboding castle, Patrick wearing a blonde wig and looking even more ridiculous than I thought he would, a rocking Goblin-esque score by Berto Pisano and an origin story that involves a beer bottle.

I wonder how the people who live in the mansion — Villa Parisi, Via Mondragone, Frascati, Metropolitan City of Rome — feel, knowing that this film, Blood for Dracula and Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror were made there. Surely that place has to be Amityville haunted.

You can get this from Severin.

How much does this 2009 made film want to look like the 1988 original?

I think that the majority of the ingenuity went into shooting this on 35mm film and using composite effects, look-alike actors, some of the original costumes and the same puppets to recreate the look of that film. A lot of work when you think about a movie that no one but video store and late night cable mutants like, but hey — here you are on our site.

Also, I realize that this movie and the one before it are both junk, but look — Rick Sloane did all the Vice Academy movies and yes, I’ve watched all six of those movies* more than six times each. Whenever I watch one of his other films — like Blood Theater, The Visitants or this one — I always start to think they’re really not good and then I say, “But he did the Vice Academy where there’s a robot cop* and that one where Dolly Parton’s porn star cousin took over Los Angeles** or when The Commissioner and Miss Thelma get married*** or that time that The Commissioner’s son unleashed a virtual reality stripper supervillain or when all the girls went to jail***** so I’ll just be nice.”

So sure, there are some changes. People have internet sex instead of over the phone, so Rick Sloane is in the future with us. McCreedy has been locked in a psychiatric hospital after he blew up the film studio real good to destroy the hobgoblins. And everyone that survived has gone away to college.

If you get the DVD of this, the original cast pretty much makes fun of the actors who took over their roles.

Now, let’s get on to making Vice Academy 7. Rick, if you’re interested, give me a call or seeing as how we’re in the future, send me an e-mail.

You can watch this on Tubi.

*Vice Academy 2 of course.

**Vice Academy 3.

***Vice Academy 4.

****Vice Academy 5.

*****Vice Academy 6.

If we’ve learned anything from sequels that don’t matter, it’s that they’re all made in Eastern Europe, so the fact that Texas took so long to move to Bulgaria surprised me.

Back in the mid 50s, Betty Hartman and Ted Hardesty are driving down a Texas road when they’re lured to a barn by the nascent Leatherface, now just Jedidiah Sawyer, and Betty is murdered by his family. When her father Sheriff Hartman (Stephen Dorff) finds her body, he makes sure that Jedidiah goes to a mental institution. Of course, his family busts him out and now Hartman is a Texas Ranger who is possibly just as messed up as the Sawyers.

This movie sat on the shelves of LionsGate and felt like it was never coming out. I don’t know who was dying to see it — well, I mean, I’ll obviously watch every sequel, so me? — but it finally came out on DirectTV more than a year later.

That said, Doriff is always great and Lili Taylor is one of my favorites. Yet this feels like the movies Chainsaw influenced and not a movie trying to influence future films.

Directors Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo made Inside and nearly made a reboot of Hellraiser and a sequel to Rom Zombie’s Halloween. Their film The Deep House got some mentions this year.

The seventh — and promised to be the last, but come on, who were they kidding — Texas Chainsaw movie, this was at least the last film for Marilyn Burns and Gunnar Hansen. It’s also pretty cool to see Bill Moseley play Jim Siedow’s role, as well as John Dugan be Grandpa again.

But they’re going to keep on making these movies long after I’m dead.

Platinum Dunes, who made the other new ones, decided they didn’t want to make another Leatherface movie, so Twisted Pictures, Nu Image and Lionsgate Films took over from New Line Cinema but only LionsGate’s name is on the movie.

Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome, but I kind of like the central idea of this movie. After the events of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the town sheriff arrives at the Sawyer house demanding that Leatherface surrender. The family complies just in time for the entire town of Newt, Texas to burn down the Sawyer home and kill everyone except a baby kill. In fact, after she’s saved, her mother is killed. The man that murdered her, Gavin Miller, and his wife Arlene raise the baby as their child.

Fast-forward and we meet Heather Miller, who learns that her grandmother has died and left her an inheritance in Newt, Texas, a place she’s shocked to learn that she was from. Her friends join her on the trip to find out what the will has in store for her, but when one of them starts casing the house to steal things, he meets Leatherface. Actually, she shouldn’t get too close to any of her friends because the most famous of the Sawyer killers just wants to wipe out everyone and anything, then make face masks out of their bodies.

The other part I kind of love about this movie is that its lead comes to accept the burden of family and realizes that if she takes care of him, he will always protect her. That’s a strange close to a film series that usually has Leatherface whooping and dancing and upset that he didn’t get to murder everyone.

A prequel to 2003’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this movie reminds me that when a franchise has run out of ideas, they always go backward. Back to the well or, in this instance, back in time for a prequel.

Back in 1939, a woman gave birth in a slaughterhouse and dies, at which point the manager throws her infant into a dumpster where its rescured by Luda Mae Hewitt, who raises the baby as her son Thomas.

Fast forward to 1969 and Thomas works in the same slaughterhouse for the same manager and when the plant gets shut down by the health department, he refuses to leave. So when the manager pushes him, he gets killed by a chainsaw and his adopted brother Charlie  (R. Lee Ermey) kills the arresting officer that comes to their home — Sheriff Hoyt — and takes on his identity.

Thomas eventually becomes Leatherface — are you surprised? — but not before wiping out an entirely different set of teens years before the original movie, including Jordana Brewster from The Fast and the Furious series.

This comes from the days when Platinum Dunes were the Blumhouse of the 2000s, reinventing horror film series like The Amityville Horror, The Hitcher, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street to varying degrees of box office success. Director Jonathan Liebesman also was behind their reboot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

At this point, even a fan of the character like me — I dressed as Leatherface for more Halloweens than I can count on a severed hand — checked out.

As much as I don’t like the Platinum Dunes era of remakes, I can admit that Marcus Nispel* is a good director and that it was cool that Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel served as co-producers, Daniel Pearl returned to be the cinematographer and John Larroquette reprised narration duties.

A big difference is that the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre only hints at the gore that the Sawyer family metes out. Here. bodies are slashed in half, people live agonizing moments after being impaled on hooks, faces get torn off and even Leatherface loses an arm.

August 18, 1973. Erin (Jessica Biel), Kemper (Eric Balfour) Morgan (Jonathan Tucker), Andy (Mike Vogel) and Pepper (Erica Leerhsen) have just bought two pounds of weed in Mexico and are on their way to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert when they make the same mistake as another set of teens by picking up a hitchhiker. However, this one is in shock and eventually pulls a gun from between her legs and blows her brains out.

That’s when this movie hit me in the face, as it slow motion had smoke coming from her mouth and pushed the camera out of the bloody hole in the back of their car. That blood, that broken glass, that death — they are no longer in our world of reality but trapped in the deepest, darkest and deadliest place in America.

Welcome to Texas.

Instead of giving us killers to identify with — or sympathize with, as other films in this series seem to do — Leatherface and the Sawyer clan are brutal and uncompromising killers who take what they want and operate with ruthless efficiency.

Meanwhile, this film looks absolutely stunning, with sweeping camera moves and probably the best use of that 2000s gunmetal blue color palette I’ve seen. Other movies try and fail at what this film does so well.

Plus, R. Lee Ermey seems to be having a blast here.

Here’s to growing up and giving movies more of a chance than casually dismissing them.

*To the director’s credit, he was against the idea of remaking the film and said that it was blasphemy to his longtime director of photography, Daniel Pearl. Pearl, however, had shot the original movie and wanted Nispel to direct the film so that he could start and end his career with the same movie. He also realized that if just copied the original movie shot-for-shot, there was no reason to make this movie. So he shot it like a traditional movie and not a documentary.

How weird is it that Pearl shot Chainsaw and Lionel Richie’s “Dancing on the Ceiling” and “Butterfly” for Mariah Carey?

New Line was doing so well with Freddy that they thought that they could do the same with Leatherface, not realizing that while he’s the most out front member of the Sawyer Family, there is an entire brood to tell the stories about.

The final film to get an X before NC-17 was created, I will say that this movie brings the gore, even after the battle between the MPAA and New Line. I mean, the movie starts off with Leatherface taking off a woman’s face, so know what you’re getting into. Yet this was submitted eleven times for a review and most of the gore was lost; this was after the original script by David J. Schow (who also wrote the scripts for The Crow, Critters 3 and 4 and many other movies) had a naked man being literally sliced into two pieces. I assume the MPAA had more issues with seeing a nude man than the gore.

Directror Jeff Burr got fired early in the film’s production, but when no one else wanted the job, he was back on. He’s already made another sequel, Stepfather II: Make Room for Daddy, and would also made Puppet Master 4 and 5 as well as Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings. He started his career with From A Whisper To a Scream and also directed The Werewolf Reborn!, Frankenstein & the Werewolf Reborn! and Mil Mascaras vs. the Aztec Mummy.

The original trailer for this might be better than the actual movie — that’s Kane Hodder as Leatherface! — but you can’t deny a movie that has Ken Foree and Viggo Mortensen in the cast. And hey — Caroline Williams shows up in a cameo as Stretch, now a reporter.

The problem with the Chainsaw sequels — actually, this goes for nearly any sequel to a major movie — is that the first two movies are wildly different takes on the form and really hard to outdo. At least Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation tries to do something really out there with the conspiracy theory wildness.

So what I’m saying is that after this, perhaps the movies aren’t as good. Probably they’re not good at all.

You know, I really try to be fair with sequels, but I can tell you that there’s no reason this movie should exist. Sure, Creepshow is too long, Stephen King is horrible in his segment and you could really not have so much in it, but it’s a blast and probably the last halfway decent thing George Romero would ever make. Creepshow 2 has snuck on me. If you asked me when I was younger, “Is it as good,” I’d qualify it by saying that it’s just missing something. Well, young me is a moron because those are three hard-hitting stories in there and the older I get, the more I sympathize with George Kennedy just trying to keep Old Chief Woodenhead painted.

But man. Creepshow 3 is the worst.

Directed by Ana Clavell and James Dudelson, who also made Day of the Dead 2: Contagium, this movie moves away from the EC Comics narrative element and is instead about a hot dog stand.

You read that right.

Man, it’s 3:13 AM and I should just go to bed, but let’s dish on this abysmal piece of fecund moviemaking.

The first story is about a girl named “Alice” and her family, who have found a remote control. If you think things like a remote turning a white family African-American is edgy, well, good for you. And at the end, a mad scientist turns her into a rabbit, which is the kind of ending kids in third grade do and their teachers give them a D.

“The Radio” has a radio that tells people what to do. “Call Girl” is about a vampire. “The Professor’s Wife” has a professor’s friends sure that his new wife is a robot until they tear her apart and he has to do voodoo to put her back together. And “Haunted Dog” literally lifts the last story from Creepshow 2 and had it be about hot dogs.

Did Clavell and Dudelson have a hot dog fetish?

Positive points: The Creep does show up at the end. And hey — America’s Sweetheart Bunny Gibson from American Bandstand plays a grandmother.

Otherwise, this movie made me question my life choices. I mean, how did I watch every Bruno Mattei and Joe D’Amato movie and not feel this way? That’s how bad this movie is.