Released: Feb 2022
Director: David Blue Garcia
Rated R
Run Time: 81 Minutes
Distributor: Netflix
Genre: Horror
Cast:
Sarah Yarkin: Melody
Elsie Fisher: Lila
Mark Burnham: Leatherface
Moe Dunford: Richter
Jacob Latimore: Dante
Olwen Fouéré: Sally Hardesty
Alice Krige: Mrs. MC
William Hope: Sheriff
As a movie fan, I have a tendency to be far more forgiving than most fans. I understand how difficult a movie is to make. So, I generally tend to give a majority of movies a bit of a pass, even if they are bad. Anybody who knows me, knows I have a fondness for bad movies. But there’s a certain joy in watching a bad movie, especially if a movie knows its bad, but rolls with it. Most movies generally don’t intend to piss their audiences off. Sometimes it happens, because people didn’t get what they were expecting. It’s fair. That’s the subjectivity of movies. I’ve come across some real stinkers over the course of my life. That said, I don’t think I’ve had a movie piss me off the way that the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre did. The original 1974 movie is a bonafide horror classic. The original sequel was more of a horror comedy, but it worked that way. The 2003 remake is one of the best horror remakes out there. In fact, you could say it jumpstarted the horror remake craze. But we’re not here to talk about the better movies in the franchise. Oh, no. We’re talking about the worst Texas Chainsaw Massacre yet.
Set nearly 50 years after the events of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with only Sally Hardesty surviving, the new film follows a group of young people. This group of yuppies are headed towards an isolated town in Texas to sell of properties at an auction. While a majority of the town seems abandoned, a local mechanic, Richter, has taken up residence. But someone else lives here too, and he has a mask…and a chainsaw. It seems that over the past 5 years, we’ve seen movie franchises get sequels that either ignores every sequel except the original, or they bring back the original characters into a new movie. Scream did it. Halloween did it. And now, Texas Chainsaw Massacre did it. The original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre worked because nobody had seen anything like it before. It was gritty and had a very documentary-style feel about a road trip ending in a nightmare. The sequels and the remakes paid homage to the original film, by at least respecting the source material, even if the films weren’t necessarily that great. Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2022 pisses on the legacy of the original film. This is literally the third direct sequel to the 1974 film, yet the connections this film has to that one are tenuous at best. The only real connection this movie has to the original is the inclusion of Sally Hardesty, the survivor of the original film. The “story” here is only window dressing to move the film from one kill to the next. I’m not the biggest fan of millenials, but the film’s comment on them and that world is so fucking ridiculous, it’s not even funny. It has all the subtlety of a chainsaw.
The acting in this film is okay at best, and completely pathetic at worst. But the characters are some of the worst I’ve ever come across. Yeah, the kids from the original film weren’t the smartest, but they didn’t deserve what happened to them. They just got lost and ended up paying for it. I don’t know if it was the intention of the film-makers to have you cheering for the bad guy, but if it wasn’t their intention, they failed miserably. Just about every character in this movie deserved getting diced. The only character that didn’t really deserve it was Richter, the redneck mechanic. He was actually pretty cool. That’s it. What they did to the character of Sally Hardesty is unforgivable. She’s essentially the low-rent version of Laurie Strode from the recent Halloween movies, only not as compelling. The late Marilyn Burns would be spinning in her grave to see what David Blue Garcia and company did to Sally. They literally threw the character into the garbage. Oh, I’m sorry, SPOILER ALERT! I don’t really care about spoiling the movie at this point.
Does the movie deliver on the massacre part of its title, at least? Yes. Yes, it does. This new Chainsaw has some pretty gnarly kills in it, even if some of them use a little CGI. The movie doesn’t shy away from people getting sawed in half or being completely eviscerated. The bus sequence is absolutely drenched in blood and gore, and is worth checking out, especially if you’re a gore-hound like me. But that is about the only real positive thing I can say about the movie. The decisions made by these characters are so incredibly stupid that even a 6 year old child would be shaking their head. I can’t believe that this movie was produced by Fede Alvarez, the guy who directed the Evil Dead remake and Don’t Breathe. I don’t understand the mindset of a group of film-makers thinking that they’re respecting the legacy of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre by shitting on it. That’s exactly what they did here. I understand that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was no Citizen Kane, but that movie garnered an audience and became one of the most respected horror movies ever made. It took it a while, but it made it. Even the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 ended up becoming a cult classic. That’s not going to happen with this one, and it shouldn’t. This movie is fucking idiotic, it’s almost beyond compare. I’m aghast at the level of incompetence involved here. Not even Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation or the 2013 movie were this bad. Just because a movie has some great gore and kills doesn’t make it a good movie. In fact, the original film had NO gore in it. It was all implied. Tobe Hooper managed to trick the audience into seeing something that didn’t actually happen. Here? There’s no such pretense. It’s a cheap fucking cash grab, and I am NOT surprised that Netflix picked it up.
In case you haven’t figured it out, yet: I can’t recommend this movie at all. It’s bullshit. It’s one of the worst fucking movies I’ve ever seen, and it’s definitely one of the most insulting. Whoever wrote this movie needs to re-watch the original movie and understand why it worked. Fuck this movie.