There are few franchises with as confusing and convoluted a timeline/canon as “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” Depending on how one approaches each installment, they’re all directly related to the 1974 original but may skip any preceding entries. For example, “Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III” ignores the second installment, while “The Next Generation” foregoes both in a quick elide to be a “true” sequel to the first movie. Then there’s the Platinum Dunes remake and its prequel, as well as “Texas Chainsaw 3D” (which serves as a sequel to the 1974 original) and its prequel, “Leatherface.” This all leads to the latest installment, Netflix’s “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” which again is meant as a direct sequel to Tobe Hooper’s innovative and shocking film.
The closest analogy to the warped timeline of “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” would be the start-and-stop continuity of the “Halloween” series with its many different branches and cul-de-sacs of storylines. The comparison is especially apt, as it’s pretty clear that director David Blue Garcia and writer Chris Thomas Devlin (from a story by Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues) took a lot of inspiration from Blumhouse’s “Halloween” sequel in that it also features an infamous masked slasher who returns to dole out carnage (despite being an old man at this point) while the previous “final girl” has grown into a rugged warrior in her own advancing years. Unfortunately, Michael Myers and Leatherface are not similar characters, and Hooper’s original film isn’t all that comparable to John Carpenter’s cult classic. As a “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” movie, this latest update fails just like so many others have before, but as a throwback to mid-tier ’80s slashers, it’s not that bad.
Almost 50 years after the grisly events of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” a group of woke social media influencers have bought out the abandoned Texas town of Harlow to offer a fresh start to their hipster-minded brethren. Talks of food trucks and self-sustaining gardens are brought to an abrupt halt when it turns out that one of the buildings isn’t vacant. Mrs. Mc (Alice Krige) still resides in her former orphanage-turned-dilapidated house along with a mysterious hulk of a man (Mark Burnham) who takes care of her. When her health takes a turn for the worse, Leatherface turns back to his old ways and begins to hunt down and kill all the cocky, naïve idealists who were unfortunate enough to come to Texas, which attracts the attention of the vengeance-seeking survivor (Olwen Fouéré) of the 1973 massacre.
Except for Hooper’s own “Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2” and possibly “The Next Generation,” every other sequel/reboot/remake has sought to make Leatherface a boogeyman akin to Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees. While the maniac is clearly the most readily identifiable character from the 1974 movie and has an iconic appearance, that was never the role he played. “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” worked because it was shot to look like an illicit affair, used grotesque imagery (but very little onscreen violence or bloodshed), and presented a clan of horrific characters who played off each other in terrifying but unique ways. If one were to combine the members of the Sawyer family, they would end up being a manic version of their inspiration, Ed Gein. Leatherface is the female skin-wearing brute who used his mass to be an enforcer but wasn’t the real menace or sadist of the bunch. Mistaking him as a figure of pure evil has been a major detraction in the subsequent “Texas Chainsaw” movies that then tried (and failed) to find other means to make up for that sinister presence with brutality and histrionics.
2022’s “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is no different, as Burnham plays the character as an unstoppable force of malevolence — silent as he stalks his prey but happy to indulge in savage means of dispatching those in his way. This familiar approach of a horror villain who’s a massive brute but also ninja-esque in his ability to sneakily hunt his victims is commonplace in slasher figures of the ‘80s but ill-fitting here, especially when a cacophonous chainsaw is the weapon of choice. This of course leads to a bunch of moments where the titular power tool is oddly silent, despite it clearly still being on. Meanwhile, the dead meats who arrive in all their Austin, Texas, condescension are paper-thin caricatures who are seemingly made to be annoying and off-putting so the audience will cheer for their deaths, with only Melody (Sarah Yarkin) showing any real compassion, especially for her sister Lila (Elsie Fisher), who’s still grappling with surviving a school shooting. Yes, the trauma of a school shooting comes into play amongst a blood-drenched tale of social media-streaming Zoomers who warn a monster carrying a chainsaw and wearing the skin of a dead woman that if he tries anything they will “cancel” him. It’s an odd fit to be sure.
On the one hand, 2022’s “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is a complete tonal shift in its treatment of characters, its visual storytelling and its approach to horror. Moving from Hooper’s movie to this one creates a whiplash, as the two don’t feel like they take place in the same reality, let alone the same franchise. However, it would also be hard to make a follow-up to “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” that captured the original’s illicit sense of the forbidden, so if someone is going to approach the subject matter, they should go their own way. In that respect, Garcia and company craft a film that feels more akin to “Friday the 13th: Part VII,” “Hellraiser III” or other late ‘80s slashers that contained buckets of blood and high body counts.
There are effective moments of gory murders, with special effects make-up artists Ludmil Ivanov, Lyudmil Nikolov and Sofia Rakova crafting innovative and truly shocking bits of violence. But the movies that inspired this film also involved repugnant characters constantly making stupid decisions, which elicited viewers to yell at the screen about their incompetency and root for them to be killed off. If a character picks up a nearby gun instead of just hiding under the bed, then they have agency and intelligence, and that forces the antagonist to counter differently and thus pose even more of a threat to terrify those watching the movie. Instead, it’s a parade of fools bungling their way through viscera-soaked set pieces.
Netflix’s “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is a poor fit with the 1974 film, and it’s probable that it was never really meant to connect except through the two characters that remain. A lot of the events are frustratingly predictable and rely on lazy plot contrivances to set up a new scare or character death. This is not a continuation to a hallowed horror movie but instead a throwback to a bygone era of horror filmmaking, complete with strengths and weaknesses that are more pronounced due to the incongruity of the franchise mask that it has placed over its story.
Starring: Sarah Yakin, Elsie Fisher, Jacob Latimore, Nell Hudson, Olwen Fouéré, Alice Krige, Mark Burnham, Moe Dunford, Jessica Allain, William Hope
Director: David Blue Garcia
