"Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (2022) review — dumpster fire horror sequel a failure
“Try anything and you're cancelled, bro.”
Just shy of 50 years after Tobe Hooper’s nihilistic horror film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) ripped its way into theatres, a group of opportunistic hacks funded by Netflix have decided to put a little more gasoline in the chainsaw. Ignoring the previous sequels, this Texas-set, Bulgaria-shot film sees a group of four young adults coming to live in the ghost town of Harlow, Texas. They’ve bought out the town’s properties, save for a creepy orphanage, and plan to sell it out to other, like-minded young people with plans to create a vibrant town in the middle of the Texas desert. “So, are you like a cult?” asks the contractor hired to work with the town’s new owners. “We’re idealistic individuals who want to build a better world,” says Ruth (played by the forgettable Nell Hudson), one of the film’s lead “characters.” When the town’s last resident, the old woman in charge of the orphanage, accidentally dies, Leatherface comes back to town for revenge. What follows is a messy, gore-filled extravaganza of senseless violence and chainsaw-caused fatality.
The umpteenth sequel/reboot/remake in the long-exhausted Leatherface saga, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (dropping “the” from the title) takes things back to basics. With a sparse runtime of only 81 minutes, minimal characterization, and a heavy emphasis on the horror and violence, it is obviously searching for the elements that made the original film such an excellent, defining horror text. What we’re left with, however, is yet another nostalgia-baiting horror “requel” — to borrow a term from Scream (2022), an excellent counter-example to everything this film does wrong — that provides nothing interesting of its own merit. It’s a bad sequel and a bad slasher. It spits in Hooper’s face with a banal, unoriginal, and insulting dumpster fire of a film.
One of the foremost problems is that director David Blue Garcia does not know how to direct a film. Despite a valiant effort from the makeup and lighting departments and cinematographer Ricardo Diaz, Garcia cannot bring the film’s elements together in a manner that represents anything interesting. There are a few moments of interesting camera work and some grisly body-slashing effects scattered throughout the film. I think particularly on a sequence early on in which Leatherface breaks out of a police vehicle. The sequence is tense and sharp. It’s violent, gross, and looks excellent. It makes the rest of the film all the worse because you have been shown what a possible good version of this project could have been like. The editing work leaves much to be desired as well. Garcia is scared of lingering on iconography, of taking things slow. Diaz offers compelling images, including one particularly memorable shot on Leatherface rising out of a sunflower field, but the film cuts away from this fascinating framing before the moment has a chance to cement itself in the mind of the viewer.
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| (Left to right): Elsie Fisher, Sarah Yarkin, Nell Hudson, and Jacob Latimore in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. © Netflix/Legendary. |
Close to halfway through the film, the sun starts to set on Harlow, making for one of the film’s most frustrating creative choices. One of the most interesting parts of the horror of Texas Chainsaw Massacre is Texas itself. Tobe Hooper’s original film revels in the endless Texas wilderness and uses this as a source of fear. His characters are isolated from civilization, left in the void of the desert. It’s an excellent example of using a location to help tell the film’s story. But in Garcia’s film, the setting sun makes the film feel smaller. Instead of relying on its defining location as a part of the horror, it limits itself to a generic rundown town that might rather have been shot in a studio than on location.
The characters, if I can be so bold in calling them that, must also be addressed. Each character in this film is written in the most confusing, uninteresting way possible. Screenwriter Chris Thomas Devlin wants to do more than the original’s barebones protagonists. He introduces a wide assortment of new faces in his film, including the four central characters, Leatherface’s “mother,” a busload of investors, a gun-totting contractor, some local cops, and a disappointing and unnecessary return from a re-cast Sally, the final girl of the first film — but Devil tries to do too much in too little time. The backstories and characteristics are confusing and poorly executed. For example, Devlin makes the insane decision to make Lila (played by the wasted Elsie Fisher) into a school shooting survivor. It’s a plot element that reads as unfortunately comedic due to how out-of-pocket its inclusion in the narrative is. He also director contradicts the story of the original film by writing Leatherface (played by Mark Burnham) the last resident of Harlow’s orphanage who has lived there ever since he was a boy. This would mean that Leatherface was, at the oldest, only twelve or thirteen in the original film despite clearly being an adult man.
Most of all, the fundamental conceit of Texas Chainsaw Massacre is flawed. It exchanges the gritty, 16mm, borderline-vérité aesthetic quality of the original for an overly digital, excruciatingly bland appearance. In fact, the mere existence of this film is astounding. Who in their right mind would be nostalgic for a film as nihilistic, violent, distressing as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? The new Texas Chainsaw Massacre tries to address this problem by stacking the film with a high body count and a metric ton of fake blood. It wants to prove that it is worthy of the name as it desperately tries to reverse engineer the lightning-in-a-bottle energy of a 50-year-old film born in a radically different period in cinema. Even its sudden, shocking ending makes the case that Texas Chainsaw is as callous as ever.
But this ending is filled with too much familiar imagery showing that Garcia has really not learned anything from Hooper. He has no confidence in his work. It lacks the edge and total disregard for its audience that makes a story like this work. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a worthless, trite film. It cannot commit to its tone and nihilism, falling back on predictable beats. It fails the legacy of the original film and is nothing remarkable on its own. Much like Leatherface, it rips up the flesh of the corpses it once loved and wears them in a phony, macabre dance. It is a poor imitation of much greater filmmakers. I believe I would rather be run through by Leatherface’s chainsaw than face the horror of another minute of this film.
Lastly, the line “try anything and you're cancelled, bro” might just be one of the worst in recent memory.
Score: 1
Texas Chainsaw Massacre is now streaming on Netflix.
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