ENTRY 04: THE HILLBILLY (Max Thompson Jr.)
"The sound of a revving motor, followed by a bloodthirsty scream of rage. The Hillbilly isn’t exactly subtle, but he makes up for it in brutal efficiency. Capable of traversing great distances at a rapid pace, those in his path will be rudely introduced to one-hundred gnashing chainsaw blades."
LORE SUMMARY: Max was born to wealthy parents who owned a thriving farm, but they were so ashamed of his strange disfigurement that they kept him chained behind a brick wall and fed him through a hole. Eventually he escaped, killed them with a chainsaw, killed every animal on their farm and ran away.
LORE SUMMARY: Max was born to wealthy parents who owned a thriving farm, but they were so ashamed of his strange disfigurement that they kept him chained behind a brick wall and fed him through a hole. Eventually he escaped, killed them with a chainsaw, killed every animal on their farm and ran away.
Wait, can media still say that? Hillbilly I mean? Or is that not even seen as a serious insult to anyone? I guess I haven't seen it in anything but a lighthearted context for a pretty long time. Maybe it just feels harsher because this guy is also born with congenital deformities and his upbringing has left him psychologically impaired, a combination that leaves him one of the sadder and more uncomfortable killers. There's also no getting around the fact that he's such an on-the-nose substitute for leatherface that he's by far the least original of the four launch-day Killers.
Aesthetically there's not all that much to this guy besides an unusual face. His deformity is mostly that the skin of his face stretches down, like a mask being pulled off, and connects to his shoulder. I feel like this should not have been too challenging for rich parents to correct, but what do I know? Maybe they were too embarrassed to even let a doctor find out they made a weird looking baby.
I feel kinda bad for not having more to say about this one, after I found a lot to talk about for the first three, and after the real actual Leatherface McMassacre was added to the game among its earliest licensed DLC, which made Max's whole original purpose kind of obsolete and could have easily just been an alternate skin, though they did give the two of them entirely different gameplay. It's really not his fault he's just an odd-looking mistreated kid whose only outstanding gimmick is a retread of a more famous character.
His expanded lore story isn't all that bad either, revealing how a megacorporation poisoned the water of his entire town and inadvertantly created him. That's a type of thing - the poisoning and congenital diseases, I mean, not chainsaw maniacs - that continues to happen to real appalachian communities that we still don't like to talk about, and when we do, a lot of people just don't care about what happens to, well, "hillbillies," so it's nice to see any acknowledgment or sympathy for their plight, even in the backstory to a dubiously tasteful video game murderer. He isn't the real villain here, but like so many other horror characters, he's what the real villains have wrought.
BEST SKIN(S):
"VILE SCARECROW:" ooh, another funky "scarecrow" costume, and this one's nasty. It's not as strikingly unique as Wraith's, but it turns Max into some sort of putrid corpse, his legs blackened and hollow looking, while slimy pink tissue and entails ooze from the patchwork of filthy burlap (or old skin?) covering the rest of his upper body, including a stitched-together faceless bag mask. It also replaces his usual melee weapon, a cattle hammer, with an ominous black scythe.
"THOUSAND EYED TOAD:" Max may have otherwise left me kind of underwhelmed, but he still has one of my favorite cosmetics in the game! Thousand Eyed Toad transforms him into a rotting mutant corpse fused with multiple frogs. There are multiple frog's eyes scattered throughout his gooey, tattered flesh, especially on his lumpy new blob of a head, while the whole fleshy mass between his head and torso becomes one giant crooked frog face, and even more frog's eyes gaze out from within his rotten, burst-open ribcage! SICK. I think we actually need some closeup shots of this one:
You can really see the extra eyeballs on his head, here, and how even the spiked club he now carries looks like a mass of amphibian flesh with little eyeballs of its own! It's just too bad they didn't reskin the chainsaw into, like, a chainsaw crocodile skull or something, and it's also too bad that a rotting amalgamation of toads wasn't just its own distinct killer.
