Director: David Blue Garcia
Writers: Chris Thomas Devlin
Stars: Sarah Yarkin, Elsie Fisher, Moe Dunford, Nell Hudson, Jacob Latimore, Alice Krige, Olwen Fouéré, and Mark Burnham
Synopsis: After nearly 50 years of hiding, Leatherface returns to terrorize a group of idealistic young friends who accidentally disrupt his carefully shielded world in a remote Texas town.
After the success of 2018’s Halloween, it was inevitable that more horror “legacy” sequels would arrive, effectively retconning all subsequent installments past the first one. 2022’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre doesn’t even shy away from its inspiration from David Gordon Green’s Halloween reboot, with a trauma-fueled Sally Hardesty (Olwen Fouéré, replacing Marilyn Burns from the original, who died in 2014) preparing herself for the night in which she will have to confront Leatherface (Mark Burnham) once again.
Hardesty waited 50 years to face him once again, and she won’t have to wait too long anymore as a group of entrepreneurs arrive in Harlow, a secluded Texas town in a bid to auction old houses to create a gentrified area. While Dante (Jacob Latimore) and Mel (Sarah Yarkin) examine an old orphanage, they meet Virginia McCumber (Alice Krige), who is still living in the house with her son, Leatherface. After the sheriff evicts her, and she dies of cardiac arrest in the car, Leatherface begins a killing spree once again and terrorizes the small town of Harlow, where Sally will be waiting for him.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre doesn’t shy away from its extreme gore during its first killing sequence, in which Leatherface will break an arm and proceed to stab its victim with his broken bone. If you don’t like that, you certainly won’t like the almost ten-minute long sequence where Leatherface decimates potential investors partying inside a bus with a chainsaw one by one. This is, by far, the goriest Texas Chainsaw Massacre installment yet, surpassing even Tobe Hooper’s bloodfest, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, by a mile.
And while the film’s action sequences are admirably done, using lots of practical effects at its disposal to effectively produce a pool of blood and guts flying off the screen, it quickly becomes tedious, since none of the characters are engaging or compelling. Every time the movie introduces a concept, or in this case, a trait that will give the character more depth, it simply presents it and does absolutely nothing else with it. For example, Elsie Fisher portrays Mel’s sister, Lila, who is a victim of a school shooting. What does the school shooting have to do with anything?
Aside from a brief scene in which she confronts gun-toting Richter (Moe Dunford), to which she explains what happened, director David Blue Garcia and writer Chris Thomas Devlin do nothing with this seemingly important piece of information (to which they keep cutting back to flashbacks of the shooting, as Lila is lying on the floor, with bullets in her body). It just comes across as a shameless way to exploit the horrors of a school shooting and parallel it with the horrors of a…chainsaw massacre?
Even if the movie would’ve removed this horrible bout of “character development,” it still doesn’t save the fact that none of the actors give any good performances. Fisher, in particular, is wasted inside a role that does her absolutely no favors whatsoever, but Yarkin and Latimore are also wasted. After what happens with Virginia, Mel immediately wants to leave town, but Dante tells her everything’s fine…when Leatherface is coming for them. Every character makes the most inane decisions possible, even when it comes to their survival instincts. Instead of running away from the threat, they almost always run towards it, which constantly ensures that the audience stays in a perpetual state of eye rolls.
Even the film’s ending will give you the biggest eye-roll of the year, or, worse, may bring you to yell out “Are you kidding me?” in front of your TV. In fact, the climax made me say that sentence twice, and then the ending came and screwed everything up. Without spoiling anything, there’s no justification for the movie to end the way it did, and even worse, to crap all over Tobe Hooper’s incredible 1974 original for pure shock value. But since there’s no emotional investment with any of the characters, including Sally Hardesty, there’s no reason for you to seek it out, unless you’re a franchise completionist.
I don’t normally say that “X film” in a franchise completely ruins the original since I’m not the one making the movies, and coming up with the story. For example, when Prometheus came out, and some critics said that it ruined the original Alien, you have to remember that Ridley Scott created the franchise and can do whatever he wants with it, without your approval. But Texas Chainsaw Massacre only exists because it hopes to “fix” the mistakes of its “terrible” sequels, but ends up making even more mistakes than the sequels, while simultaneously doing nothing of interest with its original characters, aside from giving one hell of a middle finger to Tobe Hooper’s original film. It is why I’ll permit myself saying that Texas Chainsaw Massacre completely ruins the original, and any fan of that movie should steer far, far away from its latest installment and hope that the franchise will now stay dead and buried for good.
