 Prequal to the 2003 version of  Texas Chainsaw Massacre  is set in 1969, the height of the Vietnam War. Two young men are spending a last weekend with their girlfriends before being shipped overseas to the war. At the same time in a small Texas town, the only major business (a meat-packing plant and slaughterhouse) goes out of business forcing the town s inhabitants to move on to greener pastures. One of the men who works in the plant is Thomas Hewitt, a deformed, demented psychopath (who will become known as Leatherface). When Hewitt finds out what is happening, he savagely murders the foreman of the plant. Meanwhile, the two young men and their girlfriends are headed down a lonely highway towards the town when they are involved in an car accident that cripples their vehicle. Soon they encounter the local sheriff, who is not really the sheriff, but the homicidal Charlie Hewitt, the uncle of Leatherface who has murdered the sheriff and taken his job and police car knowing that with the town deserted, no one will notice. Uncle Charlie/Sheriff Hoyt kidnaps three of the teens and takes them to his home where he, Leatherface Hewitt, the senile Uncle Monty, and Charlie s sister, Luda Mae, reside. Charlie wants the developing monster  Leatherface  to "refine" his murderous abilities. The one girl, Chrissie, who escaped unnoticed attempts to rescue them with the help of a biker whose girlfriend was killed by  Sheriff Hoyt . What follows is a night of sheer terror at the hands of a family of cannibalistic, inbred psychopaths...