And things just got a bit weirder with the release of a new entry in the franchise having just landed on Netflix. Another "re-quel," as the fifth Scream movie would call it, this new Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie is a direct sequel to Hopper's movie from 1974. And I won't lie to you: you're better of skipping it altogether.
Welcome to Harlow, a ghost town in Texas that has caught the eye of young entrepreneur Dante Spivey (Jacob Latimore). He and his colleague Melody (Sarah Yarkin), along with Dante's girlfriend Ruth (Nell Hudson) and Melody's sister Lila (Elsie Fisher), have traveled to Harlow with plans to auction off the town's abandoned buildings and turn it into a hip, trendy, gentrified neighborhood. But things don't always go to plan, do they?
Dante and Melody discover an elderly woman in the town's orphanage, and she swears she's the rightful owner of the building. The subsequent argument causes the woman to have a heart attack and die, something that doesn't sit well with the orphanage's other resident: the masked murderer Leatherface (Mark Burnham). He goes back to doing what he does best, drawing the attention of Sally Hardesty (Olwen Fouéré) in the process. Sally was the sole survivor of Leatherface's killing spree in 1974, and she's spent the last fifty years dedicated to finding and killing him. But as the original movie asked, who will survive and what will be left of them?
This is not a good movie. There's no beating around the bush. It's a dull plodding effort that has a lot of gore but not much else going for it. It isn't scary, the characters are unbelievably bland, and is pretty much borrowing ideas wholesale from the 2018 Halloween, but didn't even do anything cool with the idea.
Director David Blue Garcia doesn't really do much to make the movie feel special. There's precious little that stands out or brings anything to the franchise. It's just a generic, paint-by-numbers slasher movie that lucked into having Leatherface as its main villain. There are no real scares, no suspense, nothing to make it worth watching beyond its name. Garcia does give us a couple of slick moments, but they're so few and far between that one would almost swear they were imagining them.
The movie also suffers from a very, very, very weak script. Credited to Chris Thomas Devlin, from a story by Fede Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues, the script doesn't really tell any story worth following. Nobody is going into a movie titled "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" expecting Hemmingway-level writing, but it could've been so much better. The characters are all either boring, unlikable, or infuriatingly stupid, to the point that you don't want to root for anyone to survive. But that's not the worst of it.
For starters, one character is stated to have survived a school shooting. Was this something that got added to make the movie feel somewhat topical? Because using something seriously tragic like that as the backstory for a character in a crappy Netflix slasher movie just screams "poor taste."
And I can't mention stupid things in this movie without mentioning the bus scene. I've seen this scene brought up in numerous discussions about the movie, and I'm not surprised. It's probably the movie's most impressive set piece. But my problem is what happens just as the scene begins. Leatherface climbs aboard a party bus full of hipsters live-streaming the whole thing on social media, and this lumbering brute covered in blood, carrying a chainsaw, and wearing someone's face as a mask is told by someone, "Try anything and you're canceled, bro." Holy crap. I think we actually found something that can rival "do your thing, cuz" from Texas Chainsaw 3D for one of the goofiest things I've ever seen in a horror movie. I can forgive some of the "woke" parts, like characters wanting to remove a Confederate flag from one building. But this "cancel culture" joke just came off as the stupidest thing in a movie full of stupid things.
I also thought the idea of bringing Sally Hardesty back could've been handled a lot better. It's already bad enough that they're ripping off Halloween, but the character is only in the movie for roughly ten minutes. Her scenes weren't nearly as interesting as Laurie Strode's in Halloween, lacking a lot of the emotional weight her scenes probably should've had. You actually care about Laurie because she actually feels like she has a personality in all her appearances, as opposed to Sally. When the late Marilyn Burns played her in 1974, all she had to do was run and scream, that's it. This time around, the Sally played by Olwen Fouéré doesn't get to do much beyond hate Leatherface. And honestly, the whole thing was done way better earlier in the franchise, all the way back in the second movie in 1986. I can't be the only one that remembers Dennis Hopper's crazy performance as Sally's uncle, a Texas Ranger who went toe to toe with Leatherface and his family?
But maybe the cast could overcome the rest of the movie's faults? No, no, a whole lot of nope. There isn't a single solitary performance among the cast that rises above mediocre. I did think Mark Burnham had an intimidating presence as Leatherface, and I'd have liked to see more of what Olwen Fouéré could have done as Sally had she been given more than ten minutes of screen time. But everybody else is just disposable cannon fodder and it seems like the cast knew it. Was there nobody here that could've done a little bit more with what they were given? I know it's a straight-to-Netflix slasher movie, but that isn't too much to ask, is it?
I won't lie, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies have never really been up my alley. I do like some of them, but they've always been overshadowed in my mind by the ones I didn't like. And this was one of the ones I didn't. Outside of some impressive gore effects, everything about it felt like generic retreads of things that had been done better in other movies. It gives off the impression that someone at Legendary Pictures said, "we've got the rights, we've gotta do something with it or we've spent all that money for nothing," before just dumping it on Netflix. It's a short watch, only 74 minutes before the credits roll. But what an unimpressive 74 minutes that is. After the last few movies, maybe the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise should just be left alone for a while.
Final Rating: **
