Overcoming Sarah Marshall

I haven't been too good about watching my Netflix selections lately (and by "lately" I'm referring to the last two months); I've had "Scenes From a Marriage" and "The 400 Blows" just chilling in my living room for a good month or so. But this weekend, E. and I ended the movie drought and rented "Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2" (in honor of Halloween) and "Forgetting Sarah Marshall." As many of you know, I'm [legit] afraid of the original "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," and the sequel seemed pretty promising, being that Dennis Hopper is billed as the main character - a revenge-driven Texas lawman who plans to confront the cannibalistic family with his own "high octane saws." Yeah! Sadly, the movie was a total bust, for a few reasons:

1) Rather than remaining in their isolated, meat-thermometer-ridden farmhouse, Leatherface & co. had set up shop in an abandoned theme park ("Texas Battleland"). Admittedly, abandoned theme parks are creepy, but this one was so large - had so many distinct chambers/nooks/crannies - that is was hard to visualize as a whole. Consequently, when Stretch was running from Leatherface et. al., her escape seemed more probable: more tunnels/dark corners = more places to hide, right?
Contributing to the failure of the theme park setting were the hokey decorations everywhere: strings and strings of Xmas lights (wtf??), skeletons set up in weird displays (i.e., two skeletons in swimsuits, sitting in folding chairs beneath a beach umbrella). Part of what made the original Chainsaw Massacre so creepy was the unstructured, unstudied feel of the family's farmhouse: yes, there were chairs made out of bones, but mostly there were weird butcher's tools and meat hooks everywhere. Xmas lights just aren't that scary.

2) In this incarnation of the TCM, Leatherface is a little in love with Stretch, the woman he is supposed to slaughter. His warm feelings toward his would-be victim cause him to help stretch hide from his crazy-ass family and ultimately escape. I'm not promoting needless chainsaw violence, here, but this is a horror movie, right? Right?

3) Dennis Hopper was barely in the movie, despite his billing as a main character. I was pretty psyched for DH's performance, acknowledging his potential for creepiness, made evident in "Blue Velvet." Inexplicably, Hopper features in all of three scenes, though he's made out to be the focus of the film. Again: wtf?

"Forgetting Sarah Marshall," on the other hand, was a lot better than I expected. Sure, I thought it would be funny, but funny in a "Superbad," inundation of penis-jokes sort of way. The script was pretty good, the characters were more nuanced than the previews made them out to be, and the Dracula musical was badass. All of these things couldn't help me remember the movie's title, though, which I've alternately referred to as "Getting Over Sarah Marshall," "Overcoming Sarah Marshall," and "Losing Sarah Marshall." Oooops.