Netflix massacres Texas Chainsaw with a lousy legacy sequel
Old Man Leatherface chases some kids off his lawn in this Halloween-biting revival
Film Reviews Netflix
Netflix’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre leaves little to the imagination. That goes, first of all, for its violence—an orgy of splintered bones, lopped-off limbs, and mutilated faces. In the gore department, this umpteenth sequel has much more in common with the MPAA-incensing slasher movies of the ’80s than it does with Tobe Hooper’s original 1974 backwoods nightmare, whose title promised carnage it often implied instead of outright depicting.
The new Chainsaw is more explicit in another respect, too. It takes all the subtext of Hooper’s movie—the class tension bubbling underneath its screaming madness and murder—and grinds it into blunt text. Call that a real sign of the changing times: If grisliness in horror has fluctuated over the years, there’s no mistaking the way the genre has increasingly made mincemeat of subtlety this past decade. Every chainsaw massacre now wants to be about more than just the massacre. And this one announces its “messages” as loudly as a power tool revving and roaring in the dead of hellish night.
Here, once more, a group of fresh-faced city slickers steer off the beaten path and into certain doom in the boonies. This time, though, they’re literal gentrifiers: a group of young entrepreneurs who have snatched up the vacant properties of Harlow, a real Texas town that disappeared off maps in the 1930s. Their aim? To found a bohemian-hipster paradise, a new Williamsburg of the Southwest. “Behold the horrors of late-stage capitalism,” one of the zoomers says aloud, butchering any possibility that this trend-chasing franchise relaunch might let its themes speak for themselves.
Unfortunately for the interlopers, the slim population of Harlow includes an elderly but far from decrepit Leatherface. Almost 50 years after the events of Hooper’s movie, the rest of the Sawyer clan is long gone. Its lone surviving member now lives in an abandoned orphanage, under the care of a kindly old woman (Alice Krige) the kids unwisely, unwittingly evict. What’s more improbable than a squealing cannibal laying low for half a century, domesticated out of his fondness for cleavers and sledgehammers? How about that the madman, now 75 if he’s a day, still moves with the speed and power of an alpha predator? The big guy must be on the same vitamin regimen as his kindred spirit in geriatric killing sprees, Michael Myers.
As written by Chris Thomas Devlin, working from a story by Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues (a.k.a. the pair responsible for the equally bloody Evil Dead remake), this new Massacre wants to be the new Halloween so badly it might as well be wearing a mask made from Jamie Lee Curtis’ face. Like that overpraised hit, the film has been conceived as a “direct” sequel, wiping from the continuity every Texas Chainsaw since the first—including the 3D installment from about a decade ago that took the same tact. Isn’t it kind of arrogant to position your movie as the only proper follow-up to an iconic original and then make the same blunders as the films you’re retconning? Netflix’s version certainly doesn’t much resemble its ’70s inspiration. Visually, director David Blue Garcia takes more cues from the 2003 remake, lending a beatific sheen to cornfields and rustic buildings—a look that approximates how the characters themselves might frame and filter the Texas scenery on Instagram.
In the most shameless lift from the David Gordon Green reboot plan, the movie arranges a rematch between its hulking killer and the Final Girl that got away, hardened by age and trauma into a vengeful survivalist. Sally, who’s been hunting Leatherface her whole life, is played by Olwen Fouéré, filling in for the late Marilyn Burns. It’s a perfectly solid performance, but there’s no denying that this kind of legacy-sequel maneuver is much more affecting when the role can be reprised by the original actor—and when it’s not so underwritten. Chainsaw sets up the reunion with a hastiness that only flatters nü-Halloween, which at least took the time to establish the life the older Laurie Strode was living before her masked arch-nemesis ambled into her crosshairs.
In truth, the Old Sally stuff feels sutured, skin-suit-style, into an obvious patchwork of underdeveloped ideas. The movie can’t settle on one talking point, so it runs down a whole list of them: urban renewal, Confederate pride, liberal guilt, cancel culture, “feral hogs.” The most confused and questionably considered of its “timely” angles is the decision to make one of the heroes, played by Eighth Grade’s Elsie Fisher, a mass shooting survivor. If this is a commentary on gun violence in America, what are we to make of the triumphant moment when she overcomes her trauma by picking up a rifle and aiming it squarely at the new threat? The wrong question, perhaps, for a movie that wants to be topical but has no real perspective on its topics.
The original had a political conscience, of course—the extra meaning a viewer might glean from the clash between its carload of middle-class victims and a homicidal family of slaughterhouse workers put out to pasture by the automation of their industry. (The UK censors certainly sensed a subtext, banning the film because of what they feared it might stir in factory workers everywhere.) But Hooper, again, had the good sense not to foreground all that. He made a horror movie first—one that remains basically unparalleled, all these years later, in the depths of dread and derangement it reaches.
Is this the worst Massacre yet? There’s stiff competition for that title in a trough overspilling with unnecessary sequels, pointless remakes, and two separate misguided attempts to tell us why a young farm boy first picked up a chainsaw and started aiming it at nubile trespassers. So let’s put it another way: It might be the furthest any filmmaker has strayed from what made the original so timelessly terrifying—the way it barely seemed to function like a “normal” movie, especially in the spiraling, plotless panic of its hysterical final stretch. This time around, Leatherface is just a run-of-the-mill bogeyman, slaughtering a new generation of lambs for the sins of our age. It’s a sequel as pretentious as its chainsaw fodder: an act of genre gentrification.
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Yeah. Leatherface is surprisingly strong for a septuagenarian.Maybe it’s his diet.
It’s all about prunes, fiber, and in-out rubber catheters. You gotta be regular to be happy.
The bus scene is something, I give it that.
He also is about 70 years old in this movie as he was around what 17-20 in 1973? This movie is beyond shit. Which I guess is Supershit?
What did you expect. Like Pinhead, Leatherface was never meant to become a boring slasher. He wasn´t even really evil in the original movie. He was a colossal guy, with the mind of a toddler, commanded around by his evil siblings. Something that none of the sequels captured, like Gunnar Hansen did in his brilliant portrayal in the original chainsaw massacre. Everything after that made him a boring cookie cutter boogie man.
Not totally true. He’s made borderline sympathetic in the second one (I say “borderline” because he’s still horrifying and almost sexually assaults the protagonist, on top of all the murderin’). The whole mindless, near-innocence of him is still intact there. But yes, everyone that made one of these after Hooper just didn’t get that part of it at all.
He’s sympathetic like Blaster in Beyond Thunderdome. He’ll still fuck you up bad given the opportunity.
One of my favorite things about the original—and one of the things that makes it such a unique horror movie—is the way Leatherface seems increasingly upset that these strange weirdo teenagers keep coming up to his front door so that he has to kill them instead of finishing his housework before the rest of the family comes home. IIRC (it’s been awhile) there’s a wonderful moment where he winds up sitting on the edge of his bed after a murder with his head in his hands and a complete “Why me?” thing going on, as if murdering trespassers is just the worst thing that ever happened to him.He definitely wasn’t supposed to be a relentless, malefic force of nature like The Shape in the original Halloween.
Isn’t it kind of arrogant to position your movie as the only proper follow-up to an iconic original and then make the same blunders as the films you’re retconning? Well said that man, I absolutely hate that. The Halloween series has done it more than once, Terminator has done it (even with Cameron coming back), not doubt Alien will do it at some point. Ghostbusters sort of did it in a meta-way but it’s not an exact example because the Feig version was a different continuity anyway.There’s so much wrong with the practice – it’s arrogant, dismissive of others work, it’s lazy nostalgia bait and just generally shows a lack of ambition. It’s basically “The first one worked, let’s do that again”. And while I think “canon” is a nebulous concept at the best of times, I don’t like the way some brash newcomer can swan in and say “this is canon now, the rest isn’t any more because we said so in this new film”.
When the new Halloween movies came out I watched some of the older Halloween sequels that I never bothered to watch. I was very impressed by how much the 2017 Halloween remake “borrowed” from the 1980s Halloween 2. IIRC the hype trailer for Halloween 2017 was the long steadycam shot of Michael Myers walking around killing people, which was lifted directly from Halloween 2. I’m not sure if arrogance is even the word – laziness also springs to mind.
Yep, it’s simple laziness. If you like the Halloween movies don’t try to make a direct sequel, make an original movie that speaks to what you like about Halloween.
1. Cut your budget to nothing so that you have to use your head.
To me, there’s only Halloween (1978). While Halloween 2 wasn’t terrible, the original ended on such a perfect note, no sequels/prequels were needed.Meyers’ Shape worked as this cold, soulless agent of death on Halloween night that stalked and killed a few people and despite being mortally shot, disappeared into the night like the wind.Ever since then, they’ve turned Michael Meyers into a supernatural, hulking behemoth more akin to Jason. It’s strangely ironic that Halloween inspired Friday the 13th movies that would ultimately inspire the Halloween sequels.
Halloween III is the only real sequel! Bring back the nonsensical, anthology style to Halloween!
I don’t like the way some brash newcomer can swan in and say “this is canon now, the rest isn’t any more because we said so in this new film.”This ESPECIALLY rings true in light of the fact that Hooper is obviously incapable of even potentially weighing in. Put differently, I suspect these young filmmakers wouldn’t even dare to say “ignore everything else” if Hooper was still alive. And based on Dowd’s description of this new film, I hardly believe he would approve.
The Texas Chainsaw franchise repeatedly ignored sequels even while Hooper was alive.
We’re also seeing the coming of age of filmmakers who are so thoroughly steeped in a specific political worldview that has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer that backgrounding their social commentary is no longer sufficient.“Beyond the horrors of late-stage capitalism” says a character when describing a town that fell apart in the 19-fucking-30s. Oh, and there to build a new community using funds that someone (though certainly not him, the horror!) earned through…capitalism.
There’s increasingly a crowd that’s demanding just that, though. We’re in a world where some folks think satirizing something terrible is considered exactly the same thing the object of the satire.
Get bent, you corporatist stooge.
Yes, bfred — Late Stage Capitalism Is Good.Late Stage Capitalism is Right.Late Stage Capitalism clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit….Pardon me while I slick my hair back and change my name to that of a reptile.
At some point canon becomes irrelevant – once you’ve had separately-conceived and produced sequels, prequels, reboots, etc. then there is no through-line to follow any longer. So restarting yet again is just arrogance that YOU’RE the one who’s going to pay proper homage to the original – all these other saps just didn’t get it, man.
ghostbusters absolutely did it with afterlife. that movie is basically a movie about how good the first ghostbusters movie is. it’s like those 70s rock songs that are about rock and roll songs.
Memberberries: The Movie
‘Member the Marshmallow Man? Oh oh, remember when Gozer says ‘Are you a god?’ I ‘member!
On one of the Venture Bros. commentary tracks Doc Hammer says he has an idea for a new Hellraiser movie that would be good but also keep every other film within continuity, even the crappy ones.
Someone should hire him to do it – that kind of thinking takes way more creative juice than just ignoring the bits of history you don’t like.
but are you willing to wait 5-7 years for it to get made?
Man, I hated what T3 did to T2
It’s kind of weird as while I thought the new Scream movie was just nice, the more I think about it’s killer twist, the more I realize it hit the point harder than I originally gave it credit for.
I think Alien will just keep getting weirder and weirder, telling its own sort of disconnected stories. The fact that the current iteration is sort of a prequel that necessitates nobody be aware of anything that happened in order to preserve the chronology of the originals kind of lets them do whatever they want. Not necessarily in a good manner, mind you.Then we have the fun with the Alien v Predator mythos, which is a whole other beast.
Well, at least Olwen Fouere is getting more work. She had this whole Irish Dale Dickey vibe in Mandy that I enjoyed. She was also in Beast, which is a good movie.I’m getting increasingly annoyed that they cannot seem to find the ability to cobble together a halfway decent sequerebootmake in this franchise. I guess in 2003 we got one with Jessica Biel and insanely hot Mike Vogel, and the next one had Matt Bomer. But pretty people does not a tense, gripping horror movie make. Then they threw Alexandra Daddario in the casting mix, and she’s either a 100% guarantee a project will be awesome or a 100% guarantee it’s going to be frustratingly dull.Anyway, I’m going to go watch this one now.
Olwen Fouere was also in Sea Fever, which is worth checking out.
Thanks! I will, actually.
I need to rewatch this— Sea monster and Space monster horror are my favorite sub-genres of horror.
I didn’t love the monster, but the tension is fantastic. And there’s one cringe-inducing gory scene. It’s a little like The Thing on a boat.
I’m not going to suggest not watching it but temper expectations if you’re going in for Olwen Fouere. She’s in it for about four minutes and her only character trait is dumbass.
“insanely hot Mike Vogel”A-motherfucking-greed!!
Was he the blond who still looked good while like hanging from a hook with half a leg missing?*googles*He was!
Man, Bomer went down hard in TCM:TB! While I mostly saw his meat-spewing demise as a crass betrayal of Hooper’s clever editing in the original to trick you into thinking you had seen more than you actually had (meat hook, anyone?), I at least gave it snaps for being unabashed capital-E Exploitation. Because previous Alvarez/Sayagues stuff seemed to have similarly gleeful grindhouse sensibilities, I was foolish enough to hold out a little bit of hope for this one…oh well. (Also, am I the only one to feel weirdly protective of Elsie Fisher after “Eighth Grade”?)
Hot take I’m not even sure I can support but feels right:Alexandra Daddario is this generation’s Meg Foster.
Alexandra Daddario has eyes that are either really sexy, or really really freaky?
Its baffling to me the way both shitty “direct sequels” have made zero attempt at the ragged, semi-improvised documentary realism. As soon as you tell this story using more Hollywood-classical performance styles, you make it almost impossible to connect with.Also I hated the way this sequel recontectualized actual footage from the first film in dumb ways in the intro. Imagine taking that gorgeous Daniel Pearl 16mm footage and putting a corny Instagram “VHS style” filter over it. Imagine taking an actual widely seen promo photo of Leatherface that’s been familiar to audiences for years and claiming it’s an identikit sketch. Like you’re literally looking at a photo while a voiceover says “this is a sketch”.The film is so clearly for people who are vaguely aware of the original film without really knowing it. And that’s okay, nothing innately wrong with that. But even if you set aside the sledgehammer “themes” (which amount to “incessant mentions” really), the film ultimately fails to position the audience meaningfully: it’s both an “unwelcome asshole intruders” movie and a “hostile rednecks” movie. You know how as the 80s progressed, slasher movies started to focus more and more on making the fodder as insufferable as possible just to make the kills more gratifying? This film makes its protagonists insufferable as though it’s some kind of comment.I don’t need the movie to pick a side but where the original made gestures towards a kind of fatalism (the thesis statement might be ”America eats itself forever and that’s just life”) this one only betrays the lack of any convictions. I hope I’m not giving the impression that this surprises me.
It also doesn’t really feel like it’s connected to the original because the callous, casual violence is replaced with standard spectacle. It’s as cynical and stupid as you’d expect, and more shameless than we’ve yet seen (a school shooting backstory? C’mon, talk about unearned).I hate-watched this earlier tonight and yeah: there remains exactly one brilliant Texas Chainsaw movie. Let it rest.
Haven’t seen this new one and probably won’t, but I agree with every bit of that regardless, based solely on the trailer and having seen several other Chainsaw sequels. They need to just let this franchise die. It never should have even been a franchise. The bones were picked clean after the first movie; the second one is watchable trash, but after that, yeesh.
“the callous, casual violence is replaced with standard spectacle.”What struck me most rewatching the original was the dinner scene, which is horribly, awfully funny. Feeding “grandpa” and then his incompetent attempts to kill Sally is laughable except it’s about cannibals murdering someone who has to watch every bit of incompetence come closer to killing her. It’s deeply unsettling.
For sure the thing that people seem to gloss over about the original Chainsaw is how banal the evil is. Leatherface isn’t an immortal zombie like Jason or a faceless malevolent entity like Michael Myers, he’s just a big stupid hillbilly who eats people. The Sawyers are kinda incompetent and that makes them scarier because it makes them human.
It’s like how Franklin does have to deal with being in a wheelchair in a world making that actively difficult, but he’s also an annoying asshole! Which is to say, human.
Your heart almost breaks for Leatherface in the original! When he gets bullied by the family, and when he panics as though he’s worried he’ll get in trouble for letting intruders in, you almost want to hug the guy. He clearly just wants to be left alone and cared for. I know he kills people with a chainsaw but it seems like a tremendous betrayal to turn him into a ghoulish, squalid gore-production device.
Yeah – it seems silly when I say it out loud but the original is scary because it’s got scary weirdos in it. It’s a character piece. You spend a lot more time being upset by those characters because of who they are and how they see the world (which is as you say, also where the comedy comes from) than you do being upset by marauding chainsaw action.
What none of the sequels have ever been able to recapture is the primal terror and hopelessness of taking a very slightly wrong turn and ending up in the middle of something that just shouldn’t exist in the real world (while still making it plausible). Marketing it as a true story and filming it in 16mm grindhouse style made it fundamentally unique.Hell even the victims in the original were slaughtered for food. This just sounds like a (bad) slasher flick. The revenge element is more Jason Vorhees than Sawyer clan. The latter just wanted to be left alone.
The first movie kind of encapsulated a lot of feelings about things I had that skeeved me as a kid. The grimy 70’s feeling. The old, rotting gas station out in the middle of nowhere with a creepy guy working there and rusty old junk. My cousin I played with when I was a kid lived out in the sticks in an old farm house. There was always junk. Old rusty burn barrels, old rusty implements, old cars from the 60’s and 70’s with broken glass and sharp metal. Always something we could explore and possibly hurt ourselves on. TCM gave me the feeling that people like that could be lurking around the corner out there. The way the film was shot was sometimes disorienting, like a horrible fever dream. Not knowing where you are exactly. The darkness outside hiding unknown pitfalls and uncertain direction. Even if you could escape, you end up right back in the clutches of horror. The running jump from a second story window should hurt you but somehow in the midst of a blind screaming terror, you emerge unhurt and it’s daylight.
I grew up in Atlanta but was born and still have family in small town north Alabama. Today you’d go freeway 90% of the way, but when I was a kid more than half the ride was rural 2-lanes. Those barely-surviving gas stations were all along the route, often next to the owner’s house and barn full of the type of stuff you’re talking about. It doesn’t take much imagination to turn that one with the old guy in No Country for Old Men into TCM.
there remains exactly one brilliant Texas Chainsaw movie.Yup!
I unironically agree.
TCM 2 is so good. It’s not groundbreaking in the way the first one is, but I like it better.
Aw. I’ve always been happy to give that film the benefit of the doubt because of Hooper’s involvement (though made onlyto satisfy a contractual obligation), and it feels like it *should* be good in its way, but I come helplessly back to the fact that TCM2 kinda sucks
You are out of your goddam mind. TCM2 is *amazing*. I prefer it to the original.
YES
This.
Different kind of brilliant, Spoooon.
I love that poster as it’s send-up of Breakfast Club….considering they eat people for breakfast it makes it kind of hilarious.
Looks like they accidently used a cast photo for that. Was that an actual ad?
As soon as you tell this story using more Hollywood-classical performance styles, you make it almost impossible to connect with.
The big problem with Blair Witch 2.
Yup the original is the only great one and it’s one of the best movies in general ever. This was beyond shit. Fuck and I wanted this to be good.
Yes, but the sequel was comedy gold, especially with Hopper going Full Hopper on the cannibal Sawyer family.
“Its baffling to me the way both shitty “direct sequels” have made zero attempt at the ragged, semi-improvised documentary realism.”1) Hooper did exactly that in 1986 with Part 2. “Documentary realism” isn’t exactly a hallmark of the franchise.2) What you’re asking for, in 2022, is a found footage TCM. Is that REALLY what you want?
You should of just watched Katya and Trixie over on YouTube review it. It’s only 20 minutes.
TCM just isn’t a kind of movie that lends itself to modernization. It was a product of its time and doesn’t work in any other context. House of 1000 Corpses is probably the best effort that mostly worked in that regard. I don’t share the kind of reverence a lot of others do for the original but that doesn’t make me any less dismissive of its sequels and reboots.
Ironically, the basic premise of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre would work just fine in the present day – basically a group of college or post-college kids head to an economically depressed rural town and discover that the locals are murderous, degenerate cannibals. If there’s a political bent to the original movie, it’s the danger of mingling with country folk (something I’m sure the Texas art students who made the movie would endorse). It’s a preemptive rebuttal to op-eds about economic insecurity justifying antisocial behavior in rural communities. The problem with a modern day version isn’t that the premise is dated, it’s that the premise is so evergreen that it’s hard to update.
“I know, Leatherface will be wearing a bright-red MAGA hat the entire time!”
I assume you’re talking about the original, but I would say that TCM2 is quite good in ways the first one wasn’t.
I’m a huge fan of the original (although, I never saw any of the sequels), I appreciate the sub-text, but I don’t have to have it, I’m also down for just some good old survival horror. I enjoyed the 2003 remake, and I actually was having fun with this one, but then the final scene kind of ruined it. I can suspend my disbelief about his age for a lot, but that was just a bridge too far for me. Still, I thought it was ok up until the final shot, I especially liked the Richter character, I wish they had done more with him.
As long as I have Tobe’s TCM 2 and the workprint version of Leatherface, i’m good. I find it amusing how everyone is so baffled that a sequel/requel/whateverwehavetocallittoavoidshame won’t “work” no matter how many cynical decisions you throw at it. At least during the heyday of the slasher flick, everyone knew these flicks only existed because the last one made stupid money so as long as the flick delivered on the kills and thrills, everyone was content.
Yeah, fuck this entire thing.
The Chainsaw sequels have always been continuity-casual at best – 2 maybe followed up 1 by virtue of continued Hooper, and ‘03 and Beginning shared some cast and a house, but no matter how any other movie could claim kinship to another (apparently the recent Leatherface is a prequel to the 3D?), nobody is going to notice or care. They expect Texas, a chainsaw, and a massacre. Nobody cares if you’re the Real Shit while the last six movies were Totally Fakey, fuck off.
So that’s why every time a new Chainsaw movie claims that it disregards all the other Chainsaw movies except the original, I’m like, no fucking shit Chainsaw movie, you all do.
Not only is the tone all wrong (A Chainsaw movie needs a family and a “dinner scene”), but this movie doesn’t even mention cannibalism once!
No Stretch? No watch.
Also, no criticism is complete without mentioning that this was shot in Bulgaria and IT LOOKS LIKE IT WAS SHOT IN BULGARIA.
So when filming in Bulgaria, you massacre Chainsaw?
My favorite example of this was the 1965 film Battle of the Bulge, which despite taking place during a winter snow storm in the heavily forrested, hilly terrain of southeast Belgium, was clearly filmed in a swelteringly hot desert environment.
Not quite. I agree with you it looks nothing like Belgium, but it was filmed in the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains and outside Madrid. Not a desert
I’m from Madrid and that is actually motivating me to see it, as I did with the last terminator spotting different points of the roads.“The fall of the Roman Empire” was shot there as well, in a really harsh winter.
That gives me strong “Mountains In Illinois” vibes.
Look, I can’t blame them too much for that. Would you want to spend any time working in Texas in this day and age?
Yeah, but — Bulgaria?I get that a lot of former Eastern Bloc countries are making it very attractive to shoot there, but there is no way Bulgaria passes for Texas.
Appalachia? Yeah, maybe — but not Texas.
You know, I’d almost rather see The Bulgarian Chainsaw Massacre.
When the first promotional still dropped, and the cast looked like they wandered off the set for an Iphone ad, I instantly knew this was going to suck.
This looks like a still from a movie about four near-human aliens who’ve crash-landed on Earth and are trying to fit in.
Ha! That is it exactly, especially the open-mouthed expression of second-from-left.
What is up with her hair and eyebrows?
I thought of the Swedish series REAL HUMANS when I saw that picture — all we need is to see they’ve all got bright-green eyes.
Ha they really do.
To their credit, just on seeing that picture I felt the need to see them all messily killed.
I didn’t realize they were rebooting Search Party so soon.
Basically Elsie Fisher and a bunch of models
They also appear to hanging out in the part of Texas settled by people from the Italian Renaissance.
The two on the left do not have faces I like to look at.
Looks like the wish version of the cast of Search Party.
Netflix butchering something is nothing new.
You know what’d be novel at this point? A chainsaw movie that followed up part 4, with that Illuminati shit. Or the continued adventures of Leatherface and his improbably hot relative Alexandra D’Addario. Take one of the many sequels so far and run with it.
“Alexandra D’Addario”In fact, forget Leatherface and the chainsaws.
Can we just put Alexandra D’addario in something else?
D+ Jesus! and i was looking forward to this tonight, I’m a horror dork, so I will see for myself tonight but man this took the piss out of what I was hoping for.
the first 40 minutes are actually pretty decent, up until the bus scene, and then it feels like a completely different movie. The sunflower field scene I actually thought was super fucking tense. I don’t mind the cheesy superficial social commentary moments in slashers nowadays.
I mind very much the superficial social commentary. It just wastes screen time and effort that could go into better supporting other story elements. Don’t half-ass it. These assholes could learn a thing or two from the brilliant Machete. (The first one. Machete Kills is awful trash that somehow misses the point of its own first movie)
I’m with you, I enjoyed the first 45 minutes and think there could have been a good movie made here. Like, the bus scene should have been far more terrifying- you’re absolutely trapped and even if you somehow managed to rush him or escape YOU ARE STILL DEFINITELY GOING TO GET CUT! Even a 70 year old could plausibly kill everyone on that bus with a chainsaw because of the cramped space. That’s fucking scary!But no they had to go and give him super strength, shoehorn in Sally for some reason, and contrive a way to copy the final Leatherface shot.
Literally all I know about this film is that it’s about a bunch of dudes seeking to cancel leather face. Because like we just like heard that celebrities are being cancelled and like cancel culture is like when you say that like murder is bad, yea?
Thats not really what its about, but whatevs.
I don’t even understand how this wouldn’t be pure satire, nobody “cancels” a physical threat. If you wanted to make that movie, you’d have to have some sort of demon that can only be expelled by like, posting negative things about it on Twitter or something.
Shame that TCM 2 gets no love that was a perfectly fine sequel shouldn’t have disavowed that one in your reboot
THANK YOU!
One of my favorite movies
Sally, who’s been hunting Leatherface her whole lifeDid she never think of, I dunno, checking the area he apparently never left for 75 years?
I know – what?? There’s no way Leatherface ran off to LA to blend into the masses, or has been partying it up on 6th street in Austin for the last 50 years.
My headcanon is that she kept accidentally hunting people named “Luther Face” for decades until she realized that being chased with a chainsaw all night in the 70s really fucked up her hearing.
Darth Vader didn’t.
Point taken, but I don’t know if Lucas is the best example of narrative consistency.
At least from when Luke and Leia started making out.
I choose to believe that she’s spent her entire life wandering aimlessly around rural Texas on foot going “fuck, I know it was around here somewhere”.
This makes it especially insulting that they ignored the events of the excellent second film, which is as canon as anything gets.
Fuckin’ A
Oh, my aching banana!
which is as canon as anything gets.I see what you did there
I know I’m repeating myself but suggesting a town that went under 90 years ago is the result of late-stage capitalism is so stupid as to be straight-up insulting. I’d like to have seen this writer patting himself on the back while simultaneously sucking his own dick.
As shitty as this movie is, at least we can all agree that the first unintentionally hilarious poster with him peaking over the flowers was great!
Not that anyone cares but the filming of this movie was so tortured no one should be surprised. Sent em to Bulgaria where Fede constantly overreached and hamstrung the directors (yes, multiple, as one was fired)
you can tell something really wonky happens at the half way mark. suddenly there’s a whole new revenge plot and there is a bunch of continuity issues. It’s a shame because it was decent up to a point, and I actually didn’t hate the premise of a bunch of social media gurus using rural America as their prop.
I care! I really want to know about this production.
I’m one of those oddballs that finds something to like in every Texas Chainsaw sequel (except Next Generation, which I’ve never made it through… that movie is just painful). That said, this sounds insultingly bad. I swear, if Halloween started a new lazy trend of having Final Girls become aged survivalists who want revenge, I’m going to be mildly annoyed, mark my words!
If that means Amy Steel reprising her role from F13 Pt2, I’m in.
Terminator 2 and Aliens probably started that, but it didn’t become a trend.
True, I guess there’s a Cameron Clause in this case. Thinking about it, Halloween should have also taken the “This time there’s two or more of the thing from the first movie!” concept as well. Imagine a horde of Michael Myerses (Michaels Myer?) crawling out of the walls.
Oh hell yes, a bunch of tiny duck-sized Michael Meyers, and it’s completely unexplained, or Donald Pleasence intoning “it’s the mini-Myers! Run!”
“Behold the horrors of late-stage capitalism,”
Ouch. Sounds like this series is one of those horrors.
Meh. I’ll just rewatch the new Scream. That’s how you do a legacy sequel.
The new Scream was dreadful, too. Lame villains, cheap filmmaking/sets, and acting straight out of a soap opera. At least this new Texas Chainsaw knew what it was going for: Texas, a chainsaw, and brutal slaughters, all in a sleek 80 minute bow. Neither are good films, but give me Chainsaw any day.
What a fuckin bummer. I guess Texas Chainsaw will remain in my headcanon as a perfect, completely standalone, surprisingly restrained early slasher.
Sadly, not surprised.
One thing that seems common among these later films is they forget the horror isn’t Leatherface, at least not entirely- it’s the family and the little world he inhabits where all this is normal. You can’t quite turn him into Michael Meyers or Jason.
The first several sequels remembered to give Leatherface a creepy supporting family, right up to the ones with R. Lee Ermey. Then they were just like, screw it, it’s the Leatherface show.
I’ve always thought that the Family was WAY more creepy and disturbing than Leatherface. Oh don’t get me wrong, Leatherface was brutal as hell, but he always struck me more as an upset toddler who was going “Why the fuck are all these people suddenly just wandering into my house?!?” than the actual villain of the piece.
Yep. Bubba is just the tool.
‘…including the 3D installment from about a decade ago that took the same tact.’tact
[takt]
NOUN
adroitness and sensitivity in dealing with others or with difficult issues.tack
[tak]
NOUN
a method of dealing with a situation or problem; a course of action or policy.There, I did your job for you.
I’m not sure why anyone worries about canon for this series. Canon hasn’t mattered since like the 3rd Chainsaw movie! It’s a series where nobody has ever cared too much about continuity and you shouldn’t either. Just enjoy seeing some people get sliced and don’t worry how it connects to other things from 20+ years ago.
It’s telling that the only good Texas Chainsaw movies were the ones directed by Tobe Hooper.
It’s a shame his son never finished the All American Massacre project with Bill Mosely. That might’ve been a fun sidequel.
Maybe the lack of subtext is a commentary in itself? We’re all so much more political. My friends and I honestly had no idea where anyone else stood until about 4 years ago. Now we can’t get through a pool party without somebody going on a rant about masks or vaccines or whatever Fox has in heavy rotation that week.
“Old Man Leatherface chases some kids off his lawn in this Halloween-biting revival”A slasher film ripping off another successful slasher film? first time for everything I guess.
A great final dunk, Dowd. Your eviscerations of bad filmmaking were the lifeblood of this site.
Jesus christ this movie is trash. D+ is to kind. This movie is like a fucking trash tribute to every 2000s movie remake of good horror movies but somehow worse than them.
Spot on. It’s almost inexplicably bad. The bizarre “political”(?) subtext is … inscrutable(?). The characters are sheets in the wind. It’s mostly an excuse for a gore-fest but even then it’s weirdly incoherent. The folks here saying “well … the first 40 minutes were actually good” must have seen a different movie than me. Because the first 40 minutes were just as shit as the remaining 50 minutes. It’s insultingly bad.
100%, nothing about this movie was good. Like not a thing. Such a waste of everyone’s time.
Having watched it now, it’s not good but the party bus scene is a total delight and I will giggle every time I think about it for the rest of my life.
Well, at least the header looks like the Bloodborne cover art, so there’s that.
The same tack, a nautical term. Please tell your high school teacher that he/she/they were correct about your prospects.
“If this is a commentary on gun violence in America, what are we to make of the triumphant moment when she overcomes her trauma by picking up a rifle and aiming it squarely at the new threat?”I believe that’s exactly the point. The movie was trying to say trauma can be overcome with violence, or fear can be conquered by bravery. From the beginning, the movie is a violent response to a checklist of liberal talking points. The movie was branded Right Wing the moment a hoard of urban influencers rolled up to a rural gas station in a Tesla. This wouldn’t be the first slasher film to try to make a right-of-center political statement; the genre is full of Second Amendment propaganda. And like every time the Right tries to do satire, they don’t seem to know enough about their targets to land any meaningful point.Beyond the movie’s pitiful “shoot your fears” message, some of the missed marks could have been pretty entertaining with even a little bit of research. When (SPOILER) Leatherface boards the bus, the movie takes on cancel culture. It’s a subject that deserves satire and critique, but the movie does it with all the subtly of a literal busload of influencers aiming their cameras at a monster, their insufferable leader spouting “Try anything and your canceled, bro.” The movie doesn’t even seem to know what’s being cancelled. In the right hands, Leatherface would have been the anti-hero of this scenario, but it suddenly becomes too unbelievable even for the Chainsaw franchise. The movie makers here clearly don’t like influencers, cancel culture, gun control, gentrifiers, and electric vehicles; but all they know about those touch points is that they’re aligned with the Left. Each of those topics deserve to be satirically slaughtered, but you need to know enough about them to slaughter the hypocrisy and corruption therein. As-is, this movie just reads like an angry redneck’s Facebook rant.
I love this take. I posted in another thread, but the thrust of the original movie is that some young, modern Texas kids take a trip to the country and inadvertently run afoul of insular, brutal, cannibalistic hillbillies. It’s an evergreen premise that distills a basic anxiety of American existence down to its essence, while firmly aligning itself with the (mildly exasperating) young people. There’s a set of narrative cliches right now that lend topicality to youth-oriented entertainment by skewering certain signifiers of young adulthood. It’s a narrative trope more than a political viewpoint, and like any trope it takes on a certain meaning when it’s deployed thoughtlessly. That’s all to say that a Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie in 2022 could try to capture the feeling any sensible person gets when they lose cell reception and start seeing Trump/Pence banners. Suggesting that anxiety is misplaced – or that it marks a person as fodder – is a bold political stance that the filmmakers were likely too inept to recognize.
“It’s a narrative trope more than a political viewpoint, and like any trope it takes on a certain meaning when it’s deployed thoughtlessly.”I hadn’t thought of it that way, but that may be the problem. Today, it’s hard to make a statement without it being considered politically. On one hand, the filmmakers might not have wanted to remake the original simply by substituting smartphones and electric vehicles for the creature comforts kids were accustomed to in the ‘70s. That’s usually criticized for being reductive, see Poltergeist (2017). On the other, they may have been too afraid, or not confident enough, to defend leaning into the fears many young urbanites feel when seeing Trump/Pence signs in rural areas. It’s rare to pull that off well without making one side of the political spectrum come out on top in the end. I think The Hunt managed to balance this better than most political slasher films I’ve seen and it still got a lot of criticism from those who felt targeted. Perhaps that’s what Chainsaw’s filmmakers were going for, but the script’s message was diluted by its producers? Maybe not. I find it hard to believe any producer who felt direct political allegories that lend any legitimacy to the Right were a step too far would also find it appropriate to make our hero a school shooting survivor.
That backstory should have either been left out altogether, or been the sole premise of a completely different movie. The allegory doesn’t line up here. School shootings are usually carried out by murderers afraid of or threatened by certain cultures, whereas Chainsaw is about mainstream isolationism finding itself the victim of the very things it fears. School shootings are real, Chainsaw is (or should be) a paranoid fever dream. I do feel we’re in a current social climate – not just politically, but generationally – where this could have been highly entertaining and even meaningful, and for the first twenty minutes, that’s where I thought Chainsaw was heading. I’m a fairly liberal guy, but I do find a lot of those rural fears irrational, and that’s made for a lot of great slasher flicks over the years. This just wasn’t one of them.
I hate it when the main message of a horror film seems to just be “stick to the city, never go anywhere rural or suburban!” despite those things being somewhat necessary for a society to fully function. Similarly I hate it when the message of a film is “avoid the big city at all costs!” I would suggest it’s a weird balance, but I feel like a horror film can be made without succumbing to the tropes of “these are the stereotypes of people based on where they live, warped into pure evil!”I feel like there’s not a ton of those types of films, but enough of them that I do notice it. I was watching “Arachnophobia” the other day, and the “these rural people sure are morons” was played out for a more comical effect, but jeez, those people aren’t rural stereotypes so much as just extreme assholes.
I think the fish out of water trope in horror is so popular because most people live somewhere in the middle. I spent the first half of my life on a farm and the second in the middle of a big city, and I hear the fears from friends newer and old all the time, and it’s pretty amusing. Most people in big cities and rural areas are so ordinary they’re almost boring, but those at each end only fixate on the extreme stereotypes of the other, and people in the suburbs are scared of both. It’s just too easy to make into a horror movie, or a romcom for that matter. But it does get old when it’s the same story over and over.
Tack. Took the same tack.
Saw it, because of that same affliction that many have, the worse that you tell me it is, the more that I want to see it. [Spoilers: some youths die]It had one halfway-interesting bit with the group on the bus not comprehending that this was actually happening to them and pulling their phones out and posting it, with comments coming in about how fake it looked as they got slaughtered. It will also have you yelling Tuco’s line from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: “When you have to shoot, shoot, don’t talk”.
Having now seen this, I can safely say Dowd’s D+ is WILDLY generous. This is pure trash. It’s barely a film. It’s mostly a shitty excuse for a handful of ultra-gory set pieces … set pieces that are just ugly and empty because there aren’t any actual characters in the movie. Pure, unadulterated garbage. And not in a good way.