One of most bizarre crimes in annals of American history
There have now been eight sequels, remakes, prequels, or prequels-to-remakes of Tobe Hooper's 1974 horror-redefining masterpiece The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and I think it is relatively easy to argue that every single one of them is bad. Hooper's own 1986 follow-up The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 has its enthusiastic partisans, among whom I don't number, and the 2003 Platinum Dunes-produced remake entertained me enough, though I know that plenty of people hate it, and that's the total: two out of eight films, if we are being what I would consider maximally generous, are sort of worth your time. Meanwhile, the 1994/1997 Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation is an excellent candidate for the dishonor of being the single worst movie released in any of the Big Four slasher franchises (this, Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street).
This is all a somewhat roundabout way of saying that, as a franchise, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre no longer has a good name to besmirch, so one thing you shall not find me doing is proclaiming that the new direct-to-Netflix picture Texas Chainsaw Massacre - note the absent "the", which serves no apparent function other than, I guess, reflecting that there have been so many chainsaw massacres in Texas at this point that it's unreasonable to use the definite article - has somehow dishonored the legacy of the material. On the contrary, I would have to say this is comfortably within the top half of the franchise - a franchise that, once again, has a success rate of not more than 33%, and probably less. It's a pretty shabby Texas Chainsaw picture in some critical ways, but it's halfway decent as a generic slasher movie, and while generic slasher movies have, unexpectedly, taken to overperforming as of late, it's still nice to have a new example of a good meat & potatoes body count horror picture for those days when you just need to watch some excruciating young people die horribly.
And good gracious, but they're particularly excruciating this time around. The film's somewhat murkily-expressed backstory is that, some 50-ish years after the 1973 massacre in which one person was killed by a chainsaw and three people were not, two young entrepreneurs have traveled to the same part of Texas for some real-estate speculation. They are Melody (Sarah Yarkin) and Dante (Jacob Latimore), whose plan is a little weird and hard to follow, but basically they're hoping to flood the abandoned town of Harlow with venture capital money and make a hipster paradise in the Texas scrubland (played, to tolerably good effect, by Bulgaria and a large outdoor set that the filmmakers very clearly are proud of, given how much effort they put into showing off all the different buildings). This apparently consists solely of small artisanal restaurants, and a busload of other hip young people are coming this very day to bid on which building they want to buy in order to get in on the ground floor of this paradise that's somewher on the order of hundreds of miles away from any cosmpolitan center with a population of people who might want to actually visit. This whole project has earned the wrath of the locals, who seem quite numerous given that it's an abandoned town, and who complain about gentrification, while Melody and Dante crack jokes about late-stage capitalism. This is all apparently because screenwriter Chris Thomas Devlin, working from a story by producers Fede Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues, knows that certain terms are trendy with The Online, but he doesn't actually know what those terms mean. This will become apparent again later when a hipster threatens to "cancel" a hypertrophic mute psychopath who is murdering people with a chainsaw.
But anyway, Melody and Dante have this scheme, and today's the day to execute it, so they've arrived in what's left of Harlowalong with Dante's girlfriend Ruth (Nell Hudson) and Mel's sister Lila (Elsie Fisher). The latter comes with a big case of PTSD and a chip on her shoulder: she survived a school shooting a little while back, and this has left her both depressed and extremely, bitterly angry, with Mel getting the worst of that. That's a lot of words to get us to "Mel, Dante, Ruth, and their investors are just the most shockingly off-putting assholes, and boy oh boy, you cannot wait for Leatherface to start slaughtering them", which is where I started off. Because of course that's what happens: the one building that still has its old resident is a dilapidated orphanage run by the apparently senile Ginny (Alice Krige, whose arrival at "old enough to play senile" caught me off guard). She has a heart attack while putting up a fight, and as the police escort her to the hospital, she's joined by an enormous looming hulk of silent menace, who never does get a proper name, but he's played by Mark Burnham. Soon enough, Ginny's dead of a stress-induced heart-attack, and the man has killed the two cops and Ruth (who was riding along to the hospital for no reason other than to get the body count rolling), stripping off one of the cop's faces to wear as a grisly mask.
So far, so good. And I actually mean "good". The whole "urban trendsters want to rejuvenate a dead down in the ass-end of Texas by turning it into West Brooklyn" thing is almost indescribably stupid, not least because everybody involved obviously thought they were saying something about gentrification and the Red State/Blue State divide, but despite how artlessly the script overarticulates its themes, it never actually gets around to having an opinion on them. And the simply abysmal character writing and acting for all the non-Lila characters is pretty irritating, while the decision to give Lila "depth" by throwing a school shooting at her is profoundly tacky. But Fisher is doing her very best to make all of the script's half-formed notes cohere into a full character, and give real personality to her, and it almost all comes off well. Besides, this is a boilerplate slasher movie: it wouldn't know what to do with good writing if it had it. And where it counts, it's a pretty good boilerplate slasher movie: the killer's motivation is crisply laid out, the old orphanage is made to look emphatically creepy by director David Blue Garcia and crew, and when the kills start up, they range from pretty good to actively phenomenal - the first death in the whole movie is one of the most ingenious I have seen in any slasher to come out since the genre's 1980s golden age, and many of them are done with practical effects. Dante's death, when it comes, is attached to a nifty (if weakly-executed) bit of staging involving a swinging door; when Leatherface tears his way through a bus full of terrified investors, it's a merry bit of mayhem involving ice-blue lighting and swift cutting. It doesn't feel at all like something Leatherface would ever do (it's a very Jason sequence), but I think that in generalTexas Chainsaw Massacre is at its best when you can ignore the title and just take it as a story of hateful urbanites and hateful rednecks finding their differences resolved when they're all being torn into pieces by a murderous man-mountain.
So the real problems come in when this makes a huge giant show of being one of those newfangled "legacy sequels" that have become such a plague lately. This is the second time, after 2013's Texas Chainsaw 3D, that a new entry to the series has declared itself the One True Sequel to the 1974 original, and given how flimsy the lines of continuity have always been in this franchise, that's just kind of how they work (one could argue that every single "sequel" restarts the continuity from scratch; indeed, I think it would be harder to argue the opposite). But this goes even further than the 2013 film, by blatantly stealing from the 2018 Halloween: it has the astonishing lack of shame to haul out the first film's sole survivor, Sally Hardesty, and turn her into an unimaginative clone of that film's Badass Old Lady Laurie Strode, right down to copying the hair they gave to Jamie Lee Curtis. Marilyn Burns having passed away in 2014, the role of Sally is here played by Olwen Fouéré instead, which takes away the only reason to actually do this thing, but no matter; to not rip-off Halloween, right down to the confusing and dumb "give it the same title as the original" choice, would have required not being lazy, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre is very happily lazy at all turns. So Sally, in defiance of whatever tiny scraps we learned about her in the original film, is a driven hard-ass, having spent a lifetime as a Texas Ranger on the hunt for Leatherface (not very effectively, given the implication that he's been sitting in one place for 50 years), and now eager to finally kill him and get her revenge. This barely worked when an actor of Jamie Lee Curtis's accumulated decades of gravitas, goodwill, and talent flung herself at it; it's absolute shit when it's trotted out here. However good or bad the rest of the film is, Sally's presence invariably makes it worse.
But it has room to get worse, at least. When it's working, Texas Chainsaw Massacre is honestly pretty watchable. There are multiple well-mounted scenes of tension - Ruth trying to very slowly watch Leatherface's movements outside the ambulance she's trapped in, Mel cowering in a closet and under a bed (this covers practically a whole act, and some of it feels protracted, but individual bits of it are good). Ricardo Diaz's cinematography copies the 2003 film's look rather than the 1974 film, which is an odd choice, but the washed-out, sandy yellows give the whole thing an appropriately sticky, hot, decayed feeling. And the miraculously short running time - the end credits have started by the 75-minute mark - means that the whole thing doesn't get to screw around with anything but the tight mechanics of a cleanly-executed formulaic narrative. It's not very good (though the kills are good), but it's sturdy and satisfying as a genre film, and to ask more of a slasher sequel - a ninth film in a franchise, no less - just wouldn't be fair.
Reviews in this series
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Hooper, 1986)
Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (Burr, 1990)
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (Henkel, 1994)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Nispel, 2003)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (Liebesman, 2006)
Texas Chainsaw 3D (Luessenhop, 2013)
Leatherface (Maury & Bustillo, 2017)
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Garcia, 2022)
This is all a somewhat roundabout way of saying that, as a franchise, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre no longer has a good name to besmirch, so one thing you shall not find me doing is proclaiming that the new direct-to-Netflix picture Texas Chainsaw Massacre - note the absent "the", which serves no apparent function other than, I guess, reflecting that there have been so many chainsaw massacres in Texas at this point that it's unreasonable to use the definite article - has somehow dishonored the legacy of the material. On the contrary, I would have to say this is comfortably within the top half of the franchise - a franchise that, once again, has a success rate of not more than 33%, and probably less. It's a pretty shabby Texas Chainsaw picture in some critical ways, but it's halfway decent as a generic slasher movie, and while generic slasher movies have, unexpectedly, taken to overperforming as of late, it's still nice to have a new example of a good meat & potatoes body count horror picture for those days when you just need to watch some excruciating young people die horribly.
And good gracious, but they're particularly excruciating this time around. The film's somewhat murkily-expressed backstory is that, some 50-ish years after the 1973 massacre in which one person was killed by a chainsaw and three people were not, two young entrepreneurs have traveled to the same part of Texas for some real-estate speculation. They are Melody (Sarah Yarkin) and Dante (Jacob Latimore), whose plan is a little weird and hard to follow, but basically they're hoping to flood the abandoned town of Harlow with venture capital money and make a hipster paradise in the Texas scrubland (played, to tolerably good effect, by Bulgaria and a large outdoor set that the filmmakers very clearly are proud of, given how much effort they put into showing off all the different buildings). This apparently consists solely of small artisanal restaurants, and a busload of other hip young people are coming this very day to bid on which building they want to buy in order to get in on the ground floor of this paradise that's somewher on the order of hundreds of miles away from any cosmpolitan center with a population of people who might want to actually visit. This whole project has earned the wrath of the locals, who seem quite numerous given that it's an abandoned town, and who complain about gentrification, while Melody and Dante crack jokes about late-stage capitalism. This is all apparently because screenwriter Chris Thomas Devlin, working from a story by producers Fede Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues, knows that certain terms are trendy with The Online, but he doesn't actually know what those terms mean. This will become apparent again later when a hipster threatens to "cancel" a hypertrophic mute psychopath who is murdering people with a chainsaw.
But anyway, Melody and Dante have this scheme, and today's the day to execute it, so they've arrived in what's left of Harlowalong with Dante's girlfriend Ruth (Nell Hudson) and Mel's sister Lila (Elsie Fisher). The latter comes with a big case of PTSD and a chip on her shoulder: she survived a school shooting a little while back, and this has left her both depressed and extremely, bitterly angry, with Mel getting the worst of that. That's a lot of words to get us to "Mel, Dante, Ruth, and their investors are just the most shockingly off-putting assholes, and boy oh boy, you cannot wait for Leatherface to start slaughtering them", which is where I started off. Because of course that's what happens: the one building that still has its old resident is a dilapidated orphanage run by the apparently senile Ginny (Alice Krige, whose arrival at "old enough to play senile" caught me off guard). She has a heart attack while putting up a fight, and as the police escort her to the hospital, she's joined by an enormous looming hulk of silent menace, who never does get a proper name, but he's played by Mark Burnham. Soon enough, Ginny's dead of a stress-induced heart-attack, and the man has killed the two cops and Ruth (who was riding along to the hospital for no reason other than to get the body count rolling), stripping off one of the cop's faces to wear as a grisly mask.
So far, so good. And I actually mean "good". The whole "urban trendsters want to rejuvenate a dead down in the ass-end of Texas by turning it into West Brooklyn" thing is almost indescribably stupid, not least because everybody involved obviously thought they were saying something about gentrification and the Red State/Blue State divide, but despite how artlessly the script overarticulates its themes, it never actually gets around to having an opinion on them. And the simply abysmal character writing and acting for all the non-Lila characters is pretty irritating, while the decision to give Lila "depth" by throwing a school shooting at her is profoundly tacky. But Fisher is doing her very best to make all of the script's half-formed notes cohere into a full character, and give real personality to her, and it almost all comes off well. Besides, this is a boilerplate slasher movie: it wouldn't know what to do with good writing if it had it. And where it counts, it's a pretty good boilerplate slasher movie: the killer's motivation is crisply laid out, the old orphanage is made to look emphatically creepy by director David Blue Garcia and crew, and when the kills start up, they range from pretty good to actively phenomenal - the first death in the whole movie is one of the most ingenious I have seen in any slasher to come out since the genre's 1980s golden age, and many of them are done with practical effects. Dante's death, when it comes, is attached to a nifty (if weakly-executed) bit of staging involving a swinging door; when Leatherface tears his way through a bus full of terrified investors, it's a merry bit of mayhem involving ice-blue lighting and swift cutting. It doesn't feel at all like something Leatherface would ever do (it's a very Jason sequence), but I think that in generalTexas Chainsaw Massacre is at its best when you can ignore the title and just take it as a story of hateful urbanites and hateful rednecks finding their differences resolved when they're all being torn into pieces by a murderous man-mountain.
So the real problems come in when this makes a huge giant show of being one of those newfangled "legacy sequels" that have become such a plague lately. This is the second time, after 2013's Texas Chainsaw 3D, that a new entry to the series has declared itself the One True Sequel to the 1974 original, and given how flimsy the lines of continuity have always been in this franchise, that's just kind of how they work (one could argue that every single "sequel" restarts the continuity from scratch; indeed, I think it would be harder to argue the opposite). But this goes even further than the 2013 film, by blatantly stealing from the 2018 Halloween: it has the astonishing lack of shame to haul out the first film's sole survivor, Sally Hardesty, and turn her into an unimaginative clone of that film's Badass Old Lady Laurie Strode, right down to copying the hair they gave to Jamie Lee Curtis. Marilyn Burns having passed away in 2014, the role of Sally is here played by Olwen Fouéré instead, which takes away the only reason to actually do this thing, but no matter; to not rip-off Halloween, right down to the confusing and dumb "give it the same title as the original" choice, would have required not being lazy, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre is very happily lazy at all turns. So Sally, in defiance of whatever tiny scraps we learned about her in the original film, is a driven hard-ass, having spent a lifetime as a Texas Ranger on the hunt for Leatherface (not very effectively, given the implication that he's been sitting in one place for 50 years), and now eager to finally kill him and get her revenge. This barely worked when an actor of Jamie Lee Curtis's accumulated decades of gravitas, goodwill, and talent flung herself at it; it's absolute shit when it's trotted out here. However good or bad the rest of the film is, Sally's presence invariably makes it worse.
But it has room to get worse, at least. When it's working, Texas Chainsaw Massacre is honestly pretty watchable. There are multiple well-mounted scenes of tension - Ruth trying to very slowly watch Leatherface's movements outside the ambulance she's trapped in, Mel cowering in a closet and under a bed (this covers practically a whole act, and some of it feels protracted, but individual bits of it are good). Ricardo Diaz's cinematography copies the 2003 film's look rather than the 1974 film, which is an odd choice, but the washed-out, sandy yellows give the whole thing an appropriately sticky, hot, decayed feeling. And the miraculously short running time - the end credits have started by the 75-minute mark - means that the whole thing doesn't get to screw around with anything but the tight mechanics of a cleanly-executed formulaic narrative. It's not very good (though the kills are good), but it's sturdy and satisfying as a genre film, and to ask more of a slasher sequel - a ninth film in a franchise, no less - just wouldn't be fair.
Reviews in this series
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Hooper, 1986)
Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (Burr, 1990)
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (Henkel, 1994)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Nispel, 2003)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (Liebesman, 2006)
Texas Chainsaw 3D (Luessenhop, 2013)
Leatherface (Maury & Bustillo, 2017)
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Garcia, 2022)
