Two siblings and three of their buddies take a lil roadtrip to see if their slaughterhouse grandpa got dug up in the reported wave of grave robbings. This is something I’d completely forgotten: they’re not lost tourists, the Leatherface family is their own family’s next door neighbors. Of course they’re still new-age hippies who’ve lost touch with their roots, but they’re not such sheltered city folks that they won’t stop and pick up a freaked-out and bloody hitchhiker.

Leatherface sits down and takes a breather:

Kirk (sledgehammered) later did set decoration for The Craigslist Killer, Pam (slaughter-hooked) became a catalog foot model, and Jerry (also sledged) left the movie business. Wheelchair-bound Franklin, who sits nice and still while being surprise-chainsawed, was in the next year’s Race With the Devil. With a half-hour left, his sister Sally is the last one alive, getting subdued by a gas station guy with a broom and brought home for dinner before her famous escape. Sally was in Tobe’s Eaten Alive, the hitchhiker became a voice actor for Power Rangers, only the gas station guy returned for the sequel, but all of them – especially Leatherface Gunnar – were haunted for decades by the fangoria fanbase.

A failed recording artist turned minor cult leader ties up Nicolas Cage and kills his wife – bad move. Nic John Wicks the enemy, but with less professional skill and more sheer bloody rage. The cult calls in their supernatural enforcers, the Black Skulls biker gang, but Cage’s Rage is too strong to be stopped. The movie’s story seems like a thin excuse to unleash an intense Cage performance and psychotronic visual effects on the viewer, and this viewer ain’t complaining. Seems like I noticed references to Friday the 13th, Rob Zombie, Evil Dead, Hellraiser – there must be more.