Leatherface as he appears in the trailer for "Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III."

Viggo Mortensen as "Tex" in "Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III."

Ken Foree blasting Zombies in Romero's "Dawn of the Dead."

For some reason I found myself watching the Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequels from the 80s over the weekend. Part II, which was directed by Tobe Hooper (who did the first), was on, and it was just a weird and wild movie.

Then I found that Part III was on on Spike or something yesterday and remembered the great trailer it had, but I didn't remember actually ever seeing the film itself.

It's funny because a way pre-Lord of the Rings and even pre-Crimson TideViggo Mortensen is in it, playing one of the cannibal family. (It's a strange aside that Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger also both star in TCM: The Next Generation).

Anyway, after a little research, I found that the film is kind of notorious because the studio tinkered heavily with the film and changed a lot of things from the original script. A character played by Ken Foree (an Indianapolis resident who starred in the Romero "Dawn of the Dead") takes on Leatherface late in the film and is apparently killed by Leatherface's chainsaw during the fight (the action was somewhat offscreen, but it was strongly hinted that Foree was killed by chainsaw to the face).

However, he survives at the end, though, with barely a scratch to his face, reportedly because he tested will in advance screenings of the film, prompting the studio to force reshoots to change the ending a little. But I was wondering if anyone else had seen this movie and had a comment to make on it.

It kind of spoils Foree as a bit of trivia, and denies him a certain horror distinction, as he was also killed by Michael Myers in Rob Zombie's Halloween last year, and was the toughest of the zombie killers in Romero's Dawn of the Dead (as well as cameoing in the remake, in both saying the iconic line "When there is no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth."). He's still relatively unknown to mass audiences, but that makes him among the more prolific of horror actors, taking on two of the more iconic movie killers and zombies to boot.