Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Netflix) Movie Review

The revenge of Michael My- I mean Leatherface. The revenge of Leatherface.

by Tom Davies

Years after a deadly encounter with a deranged killer left a handful of teens dead, one woman, a survivor of that fateful night, must face her silent, masked tormentor once last time. But this time she’s ready for him.
This is the plot to David Gordon Green’s legacy sequel, Halloween.
It is also the plot to David Blue Garcia’s legacy sequel, Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Legacy sequels, it would seem, are hard to get right. And, if school taught me anything, it's that when something is hard, you just copy off someone else.

Driving out to a ghost town in the heart of Texas, Harlow, Melody and Dante are set on establishing a new community of like-minded people. A place for up and coming young artists and businesspeople which also sort of doubles as a pacifist commune away from a violent and divided society. But not every building in town is abandoned and, in the orphanage, lives an elderly woman and her ward, a strange lumbering man she took in back in 1974 after a horrific chainsaw massacre left four teens dead.

... owes more to those endless attempts to reboot the franchise than to the grungy, 16mm documentary style of Tobe Hooper

It’s easy to call out the cookie-cutter elements of the new Chainsaw. The embattled final girl, years on from the first movie; a killer that has been inexplicably lying low for decades; an embarrassing and transparent attempt to bring the themes of the original into the modern era – it’s all there in spades and it’s all, unequivocally, bad. Only on a couple of occasions does the movie diverge from the obvious path and, in those moments, there’s a flash of another film beneath the surface. A film that rails against legacy sequels, that refuses to tie things up in a neat bow and when that film surfaces, it makes it all the harder to return to the mindless slashing and “issues” oriented dialogue, penned by Chris Thomas Devlin from a story by Fede Alvarez, the inconsistently great writer of the Evil Dead reboot and Don't Breathe 2.

Inconsistently good also are the performances of Alice Krige as the mistress at the orphanage early in the film and Olwen Fouere (replacing the late Marilyn Burns) as an older, grimmer Sally Hardesty, survivor of the first massacre. Both of these actors seem to at least be aware that what they’re appearing in is an entry harking back to the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise. They play up their parts, Krige capturing echoes of the dementedness of the Sawyer family, Fouere filling Burns’ shoes as best as anyone could and doubling down on the link back to the events of 1974.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)
He's got his back to us because he's a little embarassed and he wants to save face.

But where those two perform for a movie that doesn’t really exist, the rest of the alarmingly interchangeable cast hark back more to those variable entries from the late 2000s and early 2010s. A move mirrored in the flat, shiny look of the whole endeavour, which truly owes more to those endless attempts to reboot the franchise than to the grungy, 16mm documentary style of Tobe Hooper. For a movie insistent that the last seven movies never took place, it seems a bold (dumb) decision to eschew the style of the original in favour of that of its much-maligned spawn. The unimaginative direction from David Blue Garcia as well as having the entire thing lit like shaving advert is topped off just nicely by the ever-present and eye-watering yellow tint which pervades every second of film. Because it’s hot, you guys! It’s hot in Texas. And the only way to demonstrate heat other than by having the characters constantly announce how hot they are, is to tint every shot yellow.

That's not the only element of the construction of the movie as a piece of visual media which is shabby. It’s stark and ugly and clean. Even the old ghost town, with its peeling wallpaper is unimaginably clean looking. Even the grubby gas station, the dingy orphanage, the run down auto repair shop. It all looks like a set, as opposed to something lived in. It’s all been very carefully arranged and shot and is entirely without character. Much like the teenage cast.

So in the stead of a decent production, is there at least a workable script to pin it to? No. So focussed on getting political is this film, that it completely forgets to say anything about the politics it raises. It's as though the film ends every scene with a cocky “am I right?” nod to the audience, Teens filming a gruesome murder: “Instagram. Am I right?” Young people flooding into a dead town: “Gentrification. Am I right?” Where the original gently needled at the anxieties between the city and the country, its latest incarnation comes heavily down on the side of the neglected rural townspeople in its derision of the hopeful teens and their pathetic, invasive gentrification of small town America.

... entirely without character. Much like the teenage cast.

Where Chainsaw gets really troubling is in its pushing of a controversial “good guy with a gun” attitude to violence and the parallels it draws specifically with school shootings, something which seems both wildly nonsensical and utterly tasteless. A charitable read sees it as similar to all the other half-considered thematic notes the movie touches upon, simply ham-fisted in its realisation. A less charitable one suggests that if more kids would get over their fear of guns and open carry everywhere, they wouldn’t be such sitting ducks for maniacs.

What The Texas Chain Saw Massacre of 1974 had was nuance. It might seem anathema to the constant raising of the levels of hysteria in its final half-hour, but in many ways Tobe Hooper’s grimy, bootstrapped horror knew when to hold back. Hold back on politics, hold back on explanations and, counter-intuitively, hold back on violence. This year’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre knows no such thing, insistent that we take notice of every one of its muddled little messages while displaying as much desensitising graphic violence as possible. It turns Leatherface with his eponymous power tool into nothing more than an oversized Michael Myers. A supposed 70-something, unstoppable, unkillable, with super-human strength. Not, far more upsetting, a human being bent by family and circumstance into disregarding human life. It’s not shocking, it’s not demented, it’s a waste of everyone’s time.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre is available on Netflix from 18th February 2022

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