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To cover up his disfigured face, Jed sews together a mask made of Hartman's and Lizzy's skin. A gunshot wound through the mouth renders Jed mute, and when he is rescued by Verna and his brothers, he proves his loyalty to the family by murdering Hartman and the young nurse with a chainsaw. Hartman pursues the runaways with the intention of capturing and killing Jedidiah. Ten years later, two violent teens (James Bloor and Jessica Madsen) stage a riot at the reformatory and escape, taking Jedidiah (Sam Strike) and sympathetic nurse Lizzy (Vanessa Grasse) hostage. Adult brothers Drayton and Nubbins are arrested for the murder, while young Jedidiah is taken away from Verna and put in a youth reformatory.
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The midcentury period piece stars Lili Taylor as Sawyer matriarch Verna and Stephen Dorff as Texas sheriff Hal Hartman, an obsessed lawman in the mold of Dennis Hopper's Lefty Enright, whose daughter Betty was killed by the Sawyers in 1955. Of the two, "Leatherface" is the more handsome production. But Leatherface cannot be kept down so easily. Recut and released as " Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation" in 1997, the film was still not a great success, which the producers blamed on McConaughey's agents putting pressure on the studio to bury the film for good (per Film Vault). The subsequent movie star successes of McConaughey and Zellweger earned the film a second life after it sank like a stone in 1995. Jenny survives the night and is taken to the hospital, where she catches a glimpse of the family's last victim, a still catatonic Sally Hardesty wheeling by on a gurney. While Jenny eventually manages to get the better of the Slaughters, she learns that they are merely pawns in a much larger game - an Illuminati plot to control the populace through experiences of terror like the one she endured. Henkel takes the character's interest in wigs and makeup in "TCM" to its logical conclusion, dressing Leatherface in full female drag for most of the film. Leatherface once again has a surprising inner life. Here is a handy guide to keep things sorted out. The timeline of the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" series is a knot of prequels, sequels, remakes, and do-overs. Instead, he pops up once or twice a decade, often with a different family and a different backstory than in his previous film.
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Unlike his contemporaries Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers, Leatherface has never had regular appointments with moviegoers. The film was an immediate hit, but it would take more than 10 years before a sequel was produced. Now, things have exploded into a full-bore American nightmare, so visceral in its performances and gritty filming style that audiences would insist that it was a true story, if not an actual snuff film (per The New York Post). This is the first death scene in Tobe Hooper's 1974 classic "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," and it's the moment that introduced the world to the horror icon known as "Leatherface." It happens more than 30 minutes into the film, and up to that point, Hooper and co-writer Kim Henkel cultivated a deliberate pace and almost unbearable sense of dread.
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