Netflix’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre review: Gory kills, messy politics

It’s easy to see why filmmakers keep trying to build a franchise around Leatherface, the hulking masked maniac first introduced in the 1974 splatter classic Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Like Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger and Chucky — or even like Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula — Leatherface has a familiar name and a ghoulish visage, highly marketable to fright fans. Leatherface is a horror movie villain that would make a great Mount Rushmore.

Yet for nearly four decades now — from the first Chainsaw sequel in 1986 to Netflix’s new film, confusingly titled Texas Chainsaw Massacre — the idea of a Leatherface ReiheIt has not really taken root. Each year, someone tries to restart the system or start it from scratch. ChainsawThe intention is to make multiple installments of the cinematic universe. Once the project is abandoned, it’s possible to bring on a new team of producers, directors and writers who will take over and start again.

Netflix’s new Texas Chainsaw MassacreThe movie has an extensive creative team. Not all were involved in the production from beginning to end. The major names to know are Fede Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues, who co-wrote the story and are among the movie’s producers. Chris Thomas Devlin (newcomer) is the screenwriter. David Blue Garcia takes over as director mid-production from Andy And Ryan Tohill. Álvarez and Sayagues previously collaborated on the well-received 2013 Evil DeadReboot, as well as the entries 1 and 2 in the Don’t Breathe series. If there’s a theme uniting their work — this Chainsaw included — it has to do with broken and abandoned spaces, and the sometimes shifty people who nestle deep within them.

Photo by Yana Blajeva/Legendary via Netflix

Elsie Fisher stars as Elsie Fisher in this new movie. She is best known for being the optimistic and heartbreakingly happy eighth grader. Eighth GradeAs Lila (Sarah Yarkin), a troubled teenager who goes with her sister Melody (Sarah Yarkin), and Dante (Jacob Latimore), on a trip through Texas to Harlow. There, these young entrepreneurs have bought some abandoned real estate in the hopes of creating a hipster paradise. When they arrive, they’re surprised to find that one of the dirt-cheap old homes they thought they bought is still occupied by an addled old lady, who It is really doesn’t want to leave.

The senior citizen, it turns out, is the mother of Leatherface (Marc Burnham); and when these cocky kids cause his mom’s health to go downhill, the angry lug embarks on a rampage that has him hacking his way through several of Melody and Dante’s visiting West Coast tech bros and influencers. Leatherface’s return also draws one of his old victims out of her seclusion: Sally Hardesty (Olwen Fouéré), the lone survivor of the 1974 MassacreShe has been training for the rematch since then. This Texas Chainsaw Massacre is intended as a direct sequel to the first film, set in a world where the massacre itself has become an infamous murder-mystery, covered in a TV true-crime documentary narrated by the original movie’s narrator, John Larroquette.

1974 Chain Saw — the only one where “chain” and “saw” are separated in the title — was directed by Tobe Hooper and written by Hooper with Kim Henkel, working with a cast of Austin-area hippies and theater kids. Hooper wanted to get into Hollywood by making a drive-in film that could double as commentary about how America has become so numb to violence in Vietnam. Henkel and Hooper tell an almost fairytale-like tale about Sally, played by Marilyn Burns. They visit the Hardesty estate, and stumble upon a house belonging to an eccentric cannibal clan, which includes the brutal Leatherface (the late Gunnar Hanen).

Texas Chain Saw Massacre is grubby, relentless, And genuinely shocking, thanks in part to a few good “trust nobody” twists, akin to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. (Both Psycho and Chain SawThey are loosely inspired from the true-life crime of Ed Gein, a rural Wisconsin murderer and grave-robber. L.M. Hooper was the screenwriter. Kit Carson took a different approach with 1986’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2,Making a larger-budget horror comedy that amplified the blood and gore AndThe social satire. In the second sequel, a wild vision of Texas is presented. It’s a libertarian paradise where neighbors leave dangerous people alone and allow them to create mini-empires in the sticks.

It ChainsawThe movies that followed have all been varied. Most of them have continued Hooper and company’s cockeyed commentary on Texas culture, and all have centered Leatherface, a mute man-child wearing a mask made out of human skin. All five of the films made in the 21st century — including the new one — have also followed the modern horror franchise trend of trying to reassemble the fractured narrative pieces of the earlier pictures into something like a mythology.

In the case of the Álvarez/Sayagues Texas Chainsaw MassacreThis means that Sally must be brought back. That choice ultimately feels tacked-on and unoriginal — and too reminiscent of the recent Halloween movies’ attempts to turn their original Final Girl into the villain’s most formidable opponent. Sally isn’t really a full-fledged character, she’s just a symbol.

Photo by Yana Blajeva/Legendary via Netflix

There are many things to know about this. Chainsaw is under-realized and messy — perhaps because of the project’s convoluted shoot, which saw the original directors axed one week into production in Bulgaria. Garcia’s final version packs many characters, subplots and backstory in its 83-minute runtime. But very few scenes are crucial. Beyond Sally’s return, the movie has Lila coping with PTSD from a mass shooting she survived, Moe Dunford playing a local redneck who reluctantly helps out Dante and his team of idealistic gentrifiers, and a busload of visiting Californians who respond to their first glimpse of Leatherface by pulling out their cell phones and live-streaming. These ideas don’t last long enough for them to become meaningful. The film’s social commentary — including a bit where the new kids in Harlow are offended by a prominently displayed Confederate flag — is more glancing than hard-hitting.

Fair enough, it’s a cell phone gag Is pretty funny, and it’s matched elsewhere by other clever, memorable moments. Gorehounds who are looking for brutal kills Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a few good ones, including a bit where Leatherface breaks a man’s arm and then stabs him in the neck with the shattered bone. They also included a few of their own scenes to imitate the original. Psycho-esque curveballs, including one that’s a real doozy.

All this chaos, however, is it really necessary? The idea of young folks buyingAnd renovating a ghost town feels like an extension of what Álvarez and Sayagues did with Don’t Breathe and Don’t Breathe 2These two are both set in Detroit, an economically devastated area where the heroes were once criminals. The idea that Leatherface would rob these migrants is classic. Chainsaw, looping back to Hooper’s darkly ironic take on “Don’t Mess with Texas.”

That simple concept, though — blithely arrogant outsiders getting their comeuppance at the hands of lawless yokels — is muddied up by the same tedious world-building agenda that bogs down nearly every post-Hooper Chainsaw movie. The creators of this movie are just like many other filmmakers. Texas Chainsaw MassacreThey came into the project with the intention of creating something that would last and be used by others to make more films. And once again, they have found that Leatherface is just too freaky, vicious, and downright cussed to be any team’s franchise player.

The 2022 Texas Chainsaw MassacreNetflix streaming available now