Summer of Blood: It's always fair leather
There's no reason for a film as flat and uninspired as Leatherface to have taken such a painful path into the world as it did. The short version: Lionsgate and Millennium Films acquired the rights to make several Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequels, but ended up dawdling so long on releasing the two it actually paid for that it ended up losing those rights. And "dawdling" is the only word: Texas Chainsaw 3D was ready to go in 2011, fully two years before it was finally released into theaters in 2013. Leatherface was only held back a year: the film was completed in time for its scheduled 2016 premiere, at which point the distributor and production company decided to just sit on it, for no obvious reason. When it finally came out, it was at a weak dribble: the first month of its existence in the public eye was as an exclusive pay-per-view title on the DirecTV satellite service, and it slunk into a virtually non-existant theatrical release day-and-date with a largely unpublicised release on VOD.
That's a pretty thick cloud of shame stinking up the eighth film in an iconic franchise that was riding tolerably high: Texas Chainsaw 3D is terrible, and was received as such by both critics and fans, but it still made a pretty decent chunk of money, and I have to assume that a Leatherface that wasn't hastily dropped into the world like an unwanted baby at an orphanage should have at least found some audience. It is, if nothing else, a substantially better film than its immediate predecessor, and no worse of a Texas Chainsaw picture.
Which is, in this case, an important distinction to make. Leatherface isn't a terrible horror movie - nor is it a great horror movie, please understand, nor even, arguably, a good one. But it's got some solid instincts, and it manages to bring in the extremely unpleasant, unrelenting energy of the New French Extremity horror movement into the United States mostly intact, making some changes that work well for the new cultural setting. It is, however, a fairly dogshit Texas Chainsaw movie, which is perhaps reflected in the absence of those two words from its title - the only one of the nine extant films in that series for which that is true (Texas Chainsaw 3D, incidentally, is the only other one without the word "Massacre" in its title). Meanwhile, it wouldn't do to go without mentioning that it is in fact the second Leatherface out of those same nine films, following 1990's Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III. Which I bring up in part to be thorough, but in greater part because it serves as a reminder that the relationships between all of these films is as tattered and holey as an ancient pair of socks. In the seven films preceding this one, it was all but impossible to create a link of more than two within the same narrative continuity - you could probably make the argument that most of the films didn't even really link up with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original 1974 masterpiece, itself.
Lionsgate wanted to change all of that, and Leatherface was specifically designed to create an exciting new record: the first time that three films in this franchise are explicitly in continuity with each other. Specifically, Texas Chainsaw 3D was a direct sequel to the 1974 film, going so far as to use footage from that movie (hideously reformatted into 3-D), while Leatherface is a direct prequel to the 1974 that is ostensibly designed to line up with the 2013 film as well. That "ostensibly" is doing all of the work, of course. I won't even say "it's an open question whether we needed a Texas Chainsaw Massacre prequel"; frankly, I think it's quite obvious that we did not, and Leatherface does not challenge my bigotry in this matter. It's a simply horrendous prequel, to be blunt about it, failing to understand the first thing about why the original film worked and why its chainsaw-wielding killer exerted such delirious, queasy-making power over the viewer. Leatherface, the mute giant wearing a skin mask and communicating in terrifying bestial grunts, is an all-time great horror movie creation because he feels like such an intrusion of utter, inexplicable madness and wanton evil, more of a force of nature than a mere slasher.
I wish that Leatherface turned its title character into a mere slasher. In fact, it's worse than that: it turns him into not even a mere slasher. The story goes like this: in 1955, little Jedediah Sawyer (Boris Kabakchiev) is celebrating his birthday, and his mother Verna (Lili Taylor) has decided he's to celebrate in the best fashion of the Sawyer family: by dismembering his first drifter with a chainsaw. This causes the boy no small amount of distress, and it eventually falls to Grandpa Sawyer (Eduard Parsheyan) to finish the victim off with a heavy hammer blow. But nobody holds this against little Jed, and soon enough, he's deep in the family business: when we see him, after the title appears (the credits, incidentally, are horribly: they arrhythmically fade in and out over the birthday party scene, and it feels far more like the opening credits of a TV show than a movie), he's wearing a dead cow's head as a mask - foreshadowing! - and tricking a pair of travelers into pulling off the road. We never get to know who the guy, Ted (Julian Kostov), is, which is definitely for the best, since in the original concept he was going to turn out to be the father of Sally and Franklin Hardesty from the 1974 movie, and that would have been the dumbest goddamn thing in the whole entire world. The woman we do get to know: she's Betty Hartman (Lorina Kamburova), and that matters mostly because her father is a cop, Hal Hartman (Stephen Dorff), and when Hal finds the mangled remains of Betty after the Sawyers have done with her, it completely snaps his brain, and he decides to make the rest of his career dedicated to making the Sawyers suffer, though it apparently does not cross his mind to, like, arrest them. But he does find a reason to put Jed in a juvenile psychiatric facility.
The bulk of the movie picks up ten years later, in 1965 - a mere eight years before Sally Hardesty's very unpleasant dinner party with the Sawyers - and here's the sneaky trick: we don't know what has become of Jed Sawyer. The facility he was sent to, which apparently specialises in treating the children of psychopath families (which I guess are just that prolific in Texas), renames all of the patients, in an attempt to separate them from their horrible past memories. So we only really know for sure that Jed is one of four people: Ike (James Bloor), a murderous hothead; Clarice (Jessica Madsen), a murderous pyromaniac; Bud (Sam Coleman), a ridiculous mountain of a man who doesn't speak but only grunts, and mixes in one massive brick wall of a body a childish ignorance of the world and a vicious lack of morality; and Jackson (Sam Strike), who's a little bit prone to lashing out but seems mostly okay and probably pretty redeemable; this is certainly the view of new nurse Lizzy White (Vanessa Grasse), who immediately takes a shine to Jackson. Lay them all out like that, and there's absolutely no surprise at all who turns out to be the long-lost Jedidiah. Unless you assume that the showiness with which directors Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo are shoving us towards the huge, inarticulate manchild Bud is meant to be foreshadowing and not a red herring. But that would make sense; it would make sense that the boy who would be Leatherface would be, as a teenager, a hypertrophic beast of mumbling incoherence, and not a sensitive leading-man type.
But Leatherface left "makes sense" behind right at the point it decided to exist at all, so nope, that's not what we're getting. "Sexy soulful Leatherface" would absolutely never have been my pitch, but that's not what this project is about. Which brings me back to my initial point, that if one is to engage with this film whatsoever, it can only be done by entirely refusing to consider the existence of any of the other Texas Chainsaw Massacre pictures. Fortunately, this is easily done for nearly all of the running time (a happily concise 88 minutes). After that birthday party - which is, honestly, a pretty good way to show "Little Leatherface", if such a thing must be done; it plays as a loving tribute to the many "dinner table" sequences throughout the franchise) - there's nothing that even slightly evokes the series. The rest of the story is that Ike and Clarice are able to stage a violent breakout, leaving a bunch of guards and administrators dead, and they take Bud as their muscle and Lizzy and Jackson as their hostages. They drive to a diner, where instead of laying low, Ike and Clarice murder a bunch more people; at this point, the revenge-mad Hal Hartman figures out that Jed Sawyer must be wrapped up in all of this, and Verna Sawyer, though we only learn of this later, starts to plan for her beloved prodigal son to return home. That's really all there is to it: an asylum massacre, a diner massacre, and a slow-down as the four inmates and Lizzy lay low in a trailer someplace. This last part is deadly slow, and the film only somewhat recovers from it; if Lili Taylor weren't in the cast, I would suspect that it wouldn't recover at all.
The point being, nothing about this story - teen psychos on the run - evokes Texas Chainsaw Massacre or its children. Ironically, what it does evoke is Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects from 2005, a film that couldn't possibly have been prouder about the debt it owed to the 1974 film, so we've sort of come full circle with a copy of a copy that resembles its alleged inspiration only in smudge, impressionistic ways. Stylistically, the only thing that really stands out is an aggressive piss-yellow color grade, which feels like a very shallow and inept attempt to ape the cinematography in the 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, so in a sense it does look like the franchise, but not the part of the franchise it's explicitly trying to fit in with. And it still would always, always run into that insoluble central problem: you can only ruin Leatherface by explaining him. And if the explanation is, "he was sexy and getting better, until a deranged sheriff and his own deranged mother made him less sexy", you will in fact ruin him by a whole hell of a lot.
So, yes: jettison the franchise, take the film on its own terms. It's still not exactly a good movie on those terms. The piss-yellow cinematography is still terrible, though cinematographer Antoine Sanier does do one thing I really like, filming all of the adults in the birthday party scene with fish-eye lenses that make them all look like hideous aberrations, and underscore the degree to which Jedidiah is terrified and confused by the monstrous life he's being ushered into. The characters are barely written, just a bundle of "slasher movie psycho" clichés wrapped into a poorly-structured chase narrative. It is remarkably dysfunctional, structurally, in fact. Two major massacre sequences, followed by like half the movie before the plot advances again? Who in God's name slows down a slasher movie as it moves through its second act?
Anyway, there are compensations. Lili Taylor is an actor I always love, even though she has a tendency to land in terrible projects; she seems to be laboring under the belief that Leatherface is to some degree a character piece, God bless her, and playing her scenes with the rapturous joy of a mother eager to bring her son into the True Faith. That's about it for the acting (though Stephen Dorff plays a somewhat unplayable arc well), but generally, the people who need to work at least aren't actively bad for the film, and Strike does some interesting things as we go along and he starts growing more evil.
Also, not for nothing, but Maury & Bustillo were established in the aforementioned French Extremity scene, and they do some genuinely harrowing things with those massacre sequences. American gore films tend to come in two flavors: "cool!" and "gross!" The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a conspicuous exception (not least because it's actually not very gory at all): it is draining and exhausting and nihilistic. Leatherface isn't exactly those things, but it is brutal and unpleasant, with its many bloody deaths - many, this has by far the highest body count of the franchise to that point - not so much designed to make you hoot and holler with disgusted glee, but to make you wince in revulsion at the destructibility of the human body, simultaneously fragile enough to break, and tough enough that it takes indescribable savagery and malice to actually get the job done. The death scenes in Leatherface don't all work - the diner scene is particularly gauche - but the ones that do have a cruel honesty and demand a reckoning with the harsh reality of violence like I would have never, ever, ever expected an American horror film shot in 2015 would be capable of. And the degree to which French directors shooting movie in Bulgaria (which looks Texan enough to my eyes) are making an "American" film can be debated, but this is a slasher franchise cash-in, let's not pretend it needed the kind of grim severity it possessed. If only it could have been more consistent with that, placed it into a more stable screenplay, and not taken a massive runny shit all over one of the masterpieces of '70s cinema just by existing, we might have really had something here.
Body Count: 19 is a good, solid baseline, but both the escape from the asylum and the diner massacre are confusingly assembled enough that I can't swear that it's not higher (IMDb suggests it was 22). Three of those were perpetrated by chainsaw, which is a huge number for this franchise about alleged "chainsaw massacres".
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)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
That's a pretty thick cloud of shame stinking up the eighth film in an iconic franchise that was riding tolerably high: Texas Chainsaw 3D is terrible, and was received as such by both critics and fans, but it still made a pretty decent chunk of money, and I have to assume that a Leatherface that wasn't hastily dropped into the world like an unwanted baby at an orphanage should have at least found some audience. It is, if nothing else, a substantially better film than its immediate predecessor, and no worse of a Texas Chainsaw picture.
Which is, in this case, an important distinction to make. Leatherface isn't a terrible horror movie - nor is it a great horror movie, please understand, nor even, arguably, a good one. But it's got some solid instincts, and it manages to bring in the extremely unpleasant, unrelenting energy of the New French Extremity horror movement into the United States mostly intact, making some changes that work well for the new cultural setting. It is, however, a fairly dogshit Texas Chainsaw movie, which is perhaps reflected in the absence of those two words from its title - the only one of the nine extant films in that series for which that is true (Texas Chainsaw 3D, incidentally, is the only other one without the word "Massacre" in its title). Meanwhile, it wouldn't do to go without mentioning that it is in fact the second Leatherface out of those same nine films, following 1990's Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III. Which I bring up in part to be thorough, but in greater part because it serves as a reminder that the relationships between all of these films is as tattered and holey as an ancient pair of socks. In the seven films preceding this one, it was all but impossible to create a link of more than two within the same narrative continuity - you could probably make the argument that most of the films didn't even really link up with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original 1974 masterpiece, itself.
Lionsgate wanted to change all of that, and Leatherface was specifically designed to create an exciting new record: the first time that three films in this franchise are explicitly in continuity with each other. Specifically, Texas Chainsaw 3D was a direct sequel to the 1974 film, going so far as to use footage from that movie (hideously reformatted into 3-D), while Leatherface is a direct prequel to the 1974 that is ostensibly designed to line up with the 2013 film as well. That "ostensibly" is doing all of the work, of course. I won't even say "it's an open question whether we needed a Texas Chainsaw Massacre prequel"; frankly, I think it's quite obvious that we did not, and Leatherface does not challenge my bigotry in this matter. It's a simply horrendous prequel, to be blunt about it, failing to understand the first thing about why the original film worked and why its chainsaw-wielding killer exerted such delirious, queasy-making power over the viewer. Leatherface, the mute giant wearing a skin mask and communicating in terrifying bestial grunts, is an all-time great horror movie creation because he feels like such an intrusion of utter, inexplicable madness and wanton evil, more of a force of nature than a mere slasher.
I wish that Leatherface turned its title character into a mere slasher. In fact, it's worse than that: it turns him into not even a mere slasher. The story goes like this: in 1955, little Jedediah Sawyer (Boris Kabakchiev) is celebrating his birthday, and his mother Verna (Lili Taylor) has decided he's to celebrate in the best fashion of the Sawyer family: by dismembering his first drifter with a chainsaw. This causes the boy no small amount of distress, and it eventually falls to Grandpa Sawyer (Eduard Parsheyan) to finish the victim off with a heavy hammer blow. But nobody holds this against little Jed, and soon enough, he's deep in the family business: when we see him, after the title appears (the credits, incidentally, are horribly: they arrhythmically fade in and out over the birthday party scene, and it feels far more like the opening credits of a TV show than a movie), he's wearing a dead cow's head as a mask - foreshadowing! - and tricking a pair of travelers into pulling off the road. We never get to know who the guy, Ted (Julian Kostov), is, which is definitely for the best, since in the original concept he was going to turn out to be the father of Sally and Franklin Hardesty from the 1974 movie, and that would have been the dumbest goddamn thing in the whole entire world. The woman we do get to know: she's Betty Hartman (Lorina Kamburova), and that matters mostly because her father is a cop, Hal Hartman (Stephen Dorff), and when Hal finds the mangled remains of Betty after the Sawyers have done with her, it completely snaps his brain, and he decides to make the rest of his career dedicated to making the Sawyers suffer, though it apparently does not cross his mind to, like, arrest them. But he does find a reason to put Jed in a juvenile psychiatric facility.
The bulk of the movie picks up ten years later, in 1965 - a mere eight years before Sally Hardesty's very unpleasant dinner party with the Sawyers - and here's the sneaky trick: we don't know what has become of Jed Sawyer. The facility he was sent to, which apparently specialises in treating the children of psychopath families (which I guess are just that prolific in Texas), renames all of the patients, in an attempt to separate them from their horrible past memories. So we only really know for sure that Jed is one of four people: Ike (James Bloor), a murderous hothead; Clarice (Jessica Madsen), a murderous pyromaniac; Bud (Sam Coleman), a ridiculous mountain of a man who doesn't speak but only grunts, and mixes in one massive brick wall of a body a childish ignorance of the world and a vicious lack of morality; and Jackson (Sam Strike), who's a little bit prone to lashing out but seems mostly okay and probably pretty redeemable; this is certainly the view of new nurse Lizzy White (Vanessa Grasse), who immediately takes a shine to Jackson. Lay them all out like that, and there's absolutely no surprise at all who turns out to be the long-lost Jedidiah. Unless you assume that the showiness with which directors Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo are shoving us towards the huge, inarticulate manchild Bud is meant to be foreshadowing and not a red herring. But that would make sense; it would make sense that the boy who would be Leatherface would be, as a teenager, a hypertrophic beast of mumbling incoherence, and not a sensitive leading-man type.
But Leatherface left "makes sense" behind right at the point it decided to exist at all, so nope, that's not what we're getting. "Sexy soulful Leatherface" would absolutely never have been my pitch, but that's not what this project is about. Which brings me back to my initial point, that if one is to engage with this film whatsoever, it can only be done by entirely refusing to consider the existence of any of the other Texas Chainsaw Massacre pictures. Fortunately, this is easily done for nearly all of the running time (a happily concise 88 minutes). After that birthday party - which is, honestly, a pretty good way to show "Little Leatherface", if such a thing must be done; it plays as a loving tribute to the many "dinner table" sequences throughout the franchise) - there's nothing that even slightly evokes the series. The rest of the story is that Ike and Clarice are able to stage a violent breakout, leaving a bunch of guards and administrators dead, and they take Bud as their muscle and Lizzy and Jackson as their hostages. They drive to a diner, where instead of laying low, Ike and Clarice murder a bunch more people; at this point, the revenge-mad Hal Hartman figures out that Jed Sawyer must be wrapped up in all of this, and Verna Sawyer, though we only learn of this later, starts to plan for her beloved prodigal son to return home. That's really all there is to it: an asylum massacre, a diner massacre, and a slow-down as the four inmates and Lizzy lay low in a trailer someplace. This last part is deadly slow, and the film only somewhat recovers from it; if Lili Taylor weren't in the cast, I would suspect that it wouldn't recover at all.
The point being, nothing about this story - teen psychos on the run - evokes Texas Chainsaw Massacre or its children. Ironically, what it does evoke is Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects from 2005, a film that couldn't possibly have been prouder about the debt it owed to the 1974 film, so we've sort of come full circle with a copy of a copy that resembles its alleged inspiration only in smudge, impressionistic ways. Stylistically, the only thing that really stands out is an aggressive piss-yellow color grade, which feels like a very shallow and inept attempt to ape the cinematography in the 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, so in a sense it does look like the franchise, but not the part of the franchise it's explicitly trying to fit in with. And it still would always, always run into that insoluble central problem: you can only ruin Leatherface by explaining him. And if the explanation is, "he was sexy and getting better, until a deranged sheriff and his own deranged mother made him less sexy", you will in fact ruin him by a whole hell of a lot.
So, yes: jettison the franchise, take the film on its own terms. It's still not exactly a good movie on those terms. The piss-yellow cinematography is still terrible, though cinematographer Antoine Sanier does do one thing I really like, filming all of the adults in the birthday party scene with fish-eye lenses that make them all look like hideous aberrations, and underscore the degree to which Jedidiah is terrified and confused by the monstrous life he's being ushered into. The characters are barely written, just a bundle of "slasher movie psycho" clichés wrapped into a poorly-structured chase narrative. It is remarkably dysfunctional, structurally, in fact. Two major massacre sequences, followed by like half the movie before the plot advances again? Who in God's name slows down a slasher movie as it moves through its second act?
Anyway, there are compensations. Lili Taylor is an actor I always love, even though she has a tendency to land in terrible projects; she seems to be laboring under the belief that Leatherface is to some degree a character piece, God bless her, and playing her scenes with the rapturous joy of a mother eager to bring her son into the True Faith. That's about it for the acting (though Stephen Dorff plays a somewhat unplayable arc well), but generally, the people who need to work at least aren't actively bad for the film, and Strike does some interesting things as we go along and he starts growing more evil.
Also, not for nothing, but Maury & Bustillo were established in the aforementioned French Extremity scene, and they do some genuinely harrowing things with those massacre sequences. American gore films tend to come in two flavors: "cool!" and "gross!" The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a conspicuous exception (not least because it's actually not very gory at all): it is draining and exhausting and nihilistic. Leatherface isn't exactly those things, but it is brutal and unpleasant, with its many bloody deaths - many, this has by far the highest body count of the franchise to that point - not so much designed to make you hoot and holler with disgusted glee, but to make you wince in revulsion at the destructibility of the human body, simultaneously fragile enough to break, and tough enough that it takes indescribable savagery and malice to actually get the job done. The death scenes in Leatherface don't all work - the diner scene is particularly gauche - but the ones that do have a cruel honesty and demand a reckoning with the harsh reality of violence like I would have never, ever, ever expected an American horror film shot in 2015 would be capable of. And the degree to which French directors shooting movie in Bulgaria (which looks Texan enough to my eyes) are making an "American" film can be debated, but this is a slasher franchise cash-in, let's not pretend it needed the kind of grim severity it possessed. If only it could have been more consistent with that, placed it into a more stable screenplay, and not taken a massive runny shit all over one of the masterpieces of '70s cinema just by existing, we might have really had something here.
Body Count: 19 is a good, solid baseline, but both the escape from the asylum and the diner massacre are confusingly assembled enough that I can't swear that it's not higher (IMDb suggests it was 22). Three of those were perpetrated by chainsaw, which is a huge number for this franchise about alleged "chainsaw massacres".
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)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Categories: horror, needless prequels, slashers, summer of blood, violence and gore
