Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)

Score: 1.5 / 5

Requels are great until they're not, and we've had some great ones lately. Between Scream, Halloween, and Candyman, we're in a golden age of the fairly recent genre phenomenon. It was only a matter of time before one revamped its respective franchise without the respect or "legacy" aspect the requel format requires, being both a reboot and a sequel (usually to the original classic). I was partial to Evil Dead (2013) and Friday the 13th (2009) during the early 2010s, although some fans weren't, and I think those paved the way for the last few years of our renaissance. Unfortunately, the latest horror requel (at least, before David Gordon Green's Halloween trilogy ends and his upcoming Exorcist requel is finished) misses its mark repeatedly.

Much like Green's project, it feels that the producers of Texas Chainsaw Massacre decided to make a direct sequel to Tobe Hooper's original 1974 film and ignore the long series of sequels and remakes and prequels that have littered the franchise. I've actually quite enjoyed each installment since 2003 (I hate the original three sequels), and I was still excited for this new vision, despite its unceremonious debut as a Netflix original film. But the new one from director David Blue Garcia is a bit of a mess, and I don't mean that in a good way. What goes wrong? Let's dive into the blood bath.

As a standalone film, it's pretty mediocre. A group of young entrepreneurs travel to Harlow, all but abandoned, to auction off property and create a new town of young influencers deep in the heart of Texas. A bus of influencers is about to show up, so they need to check out downtown; they run into an isolated woman and what appears to be her son who refuse to leave their place in the middle of downtown. When they force her out, we know it's only a matter of time before her "son's" rampage begins. The supposedly cautionary tale about gentrification hits us pretty hard over the head, though it's never really explored beyond that, just punished in gleeful fashion. Similarly, the new protagonist is immediately established as a final girl when she reveals that she survived a school shooting. The problem with this is that the screenplay treats this a bit exploitatively rather than substantively, and it's annoyingly obvious (when she meets the trigger-happy open-carrying Man of the Town, who is admittedly a studly man) that she'll have to overcome her hatred of guns and use one by movie's end. It's very Chekhov. It's also weirdly pro-gun (I kept waiting for the "only a good man with a gun can stop a bad man" line, but this was never so simply verbalized), which doesn't fit current discourse in the genre or in real life. On the other hand -- much like the original film -- this movie is really quite beautiful to watch, and the colorful, inspired cinematography by Ricardo Diaz makes up for a lot of the film's shortcomings.

As a sequel, the film started with some promising tidbits. Its opening sequence with voiceover narration was effective in putting us back in the feel of the franchise. We meet the new young people who populate the film -- their names don't matter because they're all chainsaw fodder, and especially in this film they all make unforgivably stupid choices again and again -- and as they head into what appears to be western Texas, they stop at a convenience store filled with Leatherface tchotchkes. It's kind of cool, Scream style, to see the iconic killer as a pop star with t-shirts and corkscrews honoring his legacy. And then there's the gore, which is wonderfully disgusting. The violence itself is only occasionally brilliant (the film's first kill is sudden and shocking and definitely scream-inducing), mostly because the characters are insufferable and there is basically no tension, but the gore is thoroughly satisfying. In fact, I felt that this might be the first time in the franchise where we actually see the title's promise played out in a single scene. The "bus scene" will be surely talked about most in this film, as its terrified passengers film the onslaught with their phones as they drown in the ungodly massacre. It's a pretty great sequence.

As a legacy sequel, the film utterly fails. The whole point of legacy is to bring back the same characters and the same actors, right? Unless there's a major problem like untimely death, I suppose (thinking of our beloved Carrie Fisher in the Star Wars requel trilogy). But Marilyn Burns, who played the original survivor Sally Hardesty, passed away in 2014, and now the character is taken over by Olwen Fouéré, who looks the part well enough. The problem is that Sally was never a compelling character, nor even a true final girl (other than that she indeed survives); the aged Sally we meet now is too similar to Laurie Strode, a survivalist and veteran Texas Ranger always ready to hunt Leatherface and his family down. It doesn't ring true to the character, who we last saw driven to insanity and screaming from the back of a pickup truck. You've got to at least try and build off what came before. And then for the film -- SPOILER ALERT -- to kill her off after so little screen time made me angry. I mean, I was fine with her demise, but then why include her at all? The only hint is that she somehow survives long enough to shoot off another round into her foe before telling the new protagonist not to run "or he'll haunt you forever." Which I guess is a nice sentiment, but we've already had a more compelling feminist drama about overcoming trauma in a slasher movie, and it's not this.

As a reboot, I'd argue it fails on similar grounds. Gunnar Hansen, who played the original Leatherface, died in 2015, and is here replaced by Mark Burnham, who plays the character (perhaps we can't blame him so much as the producers and director) with far more intelligence than he should. This Leatherface has apparently been taken in by the town orphanage, though the story is conspicuously thin on details or exposition, and his bond with the current house owner Ginny (Alice Krige) is suggested to be important and possibly intimate but isn't explored at all. Moreover, this Leatherface doesn't feel like the psychologically challenged and/or mentally ill character we initially met in 1974, who screamed when intruders materialized in his house and changed his mannerisms drastically with each new mask. Instead, this one is almost superhumanly brutal -- the first kill involves a single-handed forearm break and a stabbing with the compound fracture -- and plans some of his creative kills in advance. Leatherface should be reactionary, not exploitative. Which is weird for a franchise built as grindhouse exploitation, but here we are.