Director: Jeff Burr
Writer: David J. Schow
Starring: Ken Foree
Body Count: 4
Review: Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III begins so wonderfully and then....just... dies.
Two college co-eds are driving cross-country, passing through that no-man's-land that is northern Texas, and they pass a recently discovered mass gravesite (presumably the work of the infamous family from the first two movies). They stop for gas at the Last Chance Gas stop, and from that point, all hell breaks loose.
It's also at this point that the film starts to head downward, but not without a few really cool points. First of all, the music in Leatherface is top-notch horror-movie-metal. Second, the film features Ken Foree (from George A. Romero's zombie classic Dawn of the Dead), who engages in a lot of cool fight sequences with Leatherface and the other family members. Also, there's a few actual surprises in the film.
Ultimately, however, Leatherface falls prey to the curse of formulaic repetition present in so many sequels. It loses in the gore category (although the current video release is a new "director's cut" of the film, which supposedly restores much of the "controversial" gore).
Trivia: David J. Schow, writer of Leatherface, used to write a monthly collumn for Fangoria magazine and was also the screenwriter of the hugely successful The Crow. It's surprising, considering these facts, how lackluster Leatherface ends up being.
