To some, Butcher Boys might seem like just another crazy modern horror flick about kids making a wrong turn into a hellish scenario. But it’s a bizarre viewing experience if you are a longtime fan of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Actually, even if you aren’t. Butcher Boys is written by Kim Henkel, who wrote the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He also wrote and directed Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. And apparently, Henkel wrote the script for Butcher Boys intending it to be a sequel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
It all makes sense, because Butcher Boys is essentially a remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with a sleek urban makeover—and a whole lot of borrowing from all the movies in the franchise. There’s this group of kids who find themselves being stalked in the most isolated locations of the inner city by a group of incredibly sexy, incredibly violent young men with a hunger for flesh. Then, after about an hour of major brutality and murder inflicted upon her friends, the main girl is captured and given the Marilyn Burns treatment. Oh. And Marilyn Burns has a role in the film.
The butcher boys seem to be part of an organization that tortures and exploits women as part of some sort of underground men’s club. There’s a hulking man-beast thing that is essentially the “Leatherface” character. And then we have the “patriarchal” character, who dresses up in drag and has a taste for pretty young men bound up in duct tape in bathroom stalls.
There’s cannibalism. There are chicks locked in cages in the underground tunnels. There’s a crazy dude carrying a gun and covered in Crisco so that he can slip through the tight tunnels to find his missing daughter. People are tortured with an electric prodding device. The final girl wakes up at a table surrounded by loonies and dead bodies—after she’s given…um…a gynecological examination.
She eventually jumps out a window to escape and lands in the center of a mob scene of cops and protestors outside the building. She’s still slashed repeatedly in the back by the drag dude as she runs away. She’s also chased by the monster while the butcher boys have an all out gun war with the cops. She hops in someone’s car and screams for him to drive away. And then a rocket launcher arrives on the scene.
Yeah. Butcher Boys is pretty much just another sequel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
