No one, particularly sequel directors, can keep Leatherface under control in Texas Chainsaw Massacre…
In this sequel to the 1974 picture, Leatherface returns, and he’s still enraged.
It’s easy to see why filmmakers keep attempting to create a series based on Leatherface, the massive masked madman initially portrayed in the 1974 splatter classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Leatherface, like Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, and Chucky — or even Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula — has a well-known name and a ghastly appearance that is very marketable to horror enthusiasts. Leatherface would be on the Mount Rushmore of horror-movie villains.
Yet, for over four decades — from the first Chainsaw sequel in 1986 to Netflix’s current feature, the perplexingly named Texas Chainsaw Massacre — the concept of a Leatherface franchise has never truly taken off. Every few years, it appears, someone attempts to relaunch or restart the entire Chainsaw movie world to produce several sequels. When the production fails, a new group of writers, directors, and producers is brought on board, and the process is restarted.
The new Texas Chainsaw Massacre film from Netflix includes a vast creative crew. Not all of them were engaged from start to finish. Fede lvarez and Rodo Sayagues, who co-wrote the narrative and are among the film’s producers, are two significant figures to be aware of. (The credited author is newcomer Chris Thomas Devlin. The director is David Blue Garcia, who took over mid-production from Andy and Ryan Tohill.) lvarez and Sayagues previously worked together on the well-received 2013 Evil Dead revival, and the first two Don’t Breathe films. If there’s a common thread running across their work — including this Chainsaw — it’s a fascination with damaged and abandoned settings, as well as the often shady characters who inhabit there.
Elsie Fisher (best known for her role as the heartbreakingly optimistic eighth-grader in Eighth Grade) plays Lila, a moody teen who joins her sister Melody (Sarah Yarkin) and their foodie friend Dante (Jacob Latimore) on a trip to the dinky, devastated Texas town of Harlow, where these entrepreneurial young people have purchased some run-down real estate in the hopes of establishing an affordable hipster haven. When they arrive, they are startled to discover that one of the dirt-cheap ancient houses they believed they had purchased is still occupied by an insane old lady who refuses to go.
The elderly citizen turns out to be Leatherface’s (Marc Burnham) mother. When these smug youths cause his mother’s health to deteriorate, the enraged lug goes on a rampage, hacking his way through numerous of Melody and Dante’s visiting West Coast tech bros and influencers. Leatherface’s reappearance brings one of his former victims out of hiding: Sally Hardesty, the sole survivor of the 1974 Massacre. She has been practising for a rematch ever since. This Texas Chainsaw Slaughter is a direct sequel to the previous film, set in a universe where the massacre has become a infamous murder mystery, noted in a TV true-crime documentary told by the original film’s narrator, John Larroquette.
Tobe Hooper directed the 1974 Chain Saw, the only film in which the words “chain” and “saw” are separated in the title, and wrote it with Kim Henkel, working with a cast of Austin-area hippies and theatre kids. Hooper hoped to break into Hollywood with a low-budget drive-in film that also reflected how America had gotten accustomed to violence during the Vietnam War. He and Henkel present a simple, almost folktale-like yarn about Sally (the late Marilyn Burns) and her friends visiting the old Hardesty family estate and unintentionally discovering a nearby mansion held by an eccentric tribe of cannibals including the fearsome Leatherface (the late Gunnar Hansen).
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is filthy, unrelenting, and truly shocking, owing in part to a few brilliant “trust nobody” turns a la Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. (Both Psycho and Chain Saw are partially based on the real-life crimes of Ed Gein, a rural Wisconsin grave thief and killer.) With 1986’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Hooper and screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson adopted a new approach, creating a larger-budget horror-comedy that amplified both the gore and the social satire. The first sequel paints a highly fanciful picture of Texas as an anything-goes libertarian utopia where dangerous outcasts are generally left alone by their neighbours and permitted to create mini-empires out in the countryside.
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Since then, the Chainsaw flicks have been a mishmash. The majority of them have continued Hooper and its wacky satire on Texas society. All have centred on Leatherface, a mute man-child wearing a human skin mask. All five films created in the twenty-first century, including the current one, have also followed the modern horror franchise tendency to reconstruct the fragmented narrative fragments of the preceding films into something like mythology.
In the case of the lvarez/Sayagues Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this entails resurrecting Sally. That choice eventually feels tacked-on and unimaginative — and all too similar to previous Halloween films’ attempts to make its original Final Girl the villain’s most fearsome opponent. Sally is only a symbol, not a full-fledged character.
Much of this Chainsaw is under-realized and sloppy, possibly because of the project’s complicated shoot, which saw the initial directors fired one week into filming in Bulgaria. Garcia’s final version of the picture crams a lot of characters, subplots, and background into its 83 minutes, and only a handful of them are necessary. Aside from Sally’s reappearance, the film features Lila dealing with PTSD from a mass shooting she survived, Moe Dunford as a local redneck who reluctantly assists Dante and his team of unrealistic gentrifiers, and a loads of visiting Californians. They react to their first sight of Leatherface by pulling out their cell phones and live-streaming.
None of these concepts survives long enough to mature into anything useful. The film’s social critique, which includes a scene in which the new kids in Harlow are insulted by a conspicuously displayed Confederate flag, is more oblique than direct.
To be honest, the mobile phone prank is rather amusing, and it is matched by other creative, memorable moments. Texas Chainsaw Massacre contains a few gory deaths for gorehounds, including one in which Leatherface fractures a man’s arm and then stabs him in the neck with the splintered bone. The producers also pay homage to the original by tossing in a few Psycho-style curveballs, one of which is a genuine doozy.
But what is the point of all this chaos? The concept of young people purchasing and restoring a ghost town sounds like a continuation of what lvarez and Sayagues achieved with Don’t Breathe and Don’t Breathe 2, both of which are set in economically decimated Detroit areas even the heroes are criminals. And the notion that Leatherface would cut up these intruders is classic Chainsaw, harkening back to Hooper’s darkly satirical rendition of “Don’t Mess with Texas.”
However, that simple notion — blithely arrogant foreigners getting their comeuppance at the hands of lawless yokels — is clouded by the same ponderous world-building goal that slows down practically every post-Hooper Chainsaw movie. The producers of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, like so many other filmmakers before them, set out to create something permanent, something that others might use as a foundation for future films. And, once again, they’ve discovered that Leatherface is just too bizarre, violent, and downright cussed to be a franchise player for any club.
