Following in the footsteps of the recent Halloween and Candyman legacy sequels (or, ‘requels’, to give them the name coined in this year’s Scream, itself a requel), the latest entry in the saga of chainsaw-wielding cannibal Leatherface is all about going back to the original. Ignoring the previous sequels, prequels and remakes, this one’s a direct follow-up to Tobe Hooper’s scuzzy 1974 masterpiece, and begins in much the same way — with a group of young adults driving through rural Texas, where the violent locals, er, won’t take kindly to them. In ’74, they were hippies — free-spirited kids whose casual attitudes to sex and short-shorts found them on the receiving end of hammer-bashings, meat-hooks and, yes, chainsaws. This time, they’re urban hipster influencers, with plans to gentrify a small Texas town through artisan eateries and trendy shops. If Leatherface never struck you as the brunch type, well — spoiler alert — he’s not.
There’s a kernel of a solid idea to Texas Chainsaw Massacre (taking a cue from The Social Network’s Sean Parker, they’ve dropped the “The”), with its updating of the original’s culture-clash dynamic. The 82-minute runtime (an ultra-lean 74 minutes minus credits) offers little chance to get to know any of the new blood particularly well — but it’s welcome to see Happy Death Day 2U’s Sarah Yarkin and a post-Eighth Grade Elsie Fisher in major roles as central sisters Mel, the new owner of small-town Harlow, and Lila, who survived a school shooting, respectively. Tonally, though, David Blue Garcia’s film (he took over as director from Ryan and Andy Tohill one week into production) couldn’t be further from Hooper’s still-terrifying classic. There, the chainsaw violence was far less graphic, but the atmosphere was suffocating — a sense of depravity, decomposition and discordancy that felt impossible to scrub off. Here, the physical violence is majorly ramped up (heads crunch, saws rev, innards spill), but the psychological violence is non-existent — which might be less of an issue if Texas Chainsaw Massacre didn’t directly invoke its predecessor.
Despite positioning itself as a definitive sequel to an outright classic, this Texas Chainsaw (not to be confused with 2013’s Texas Chainsaw, itself intended as a direct sequel to Hooper’s film) is ultimately just a dumb, schlocky slasher — and on that front, it boasts fun sequences. A legitimate Texas chainsaw massacre on a crowded bus delivers bravura gore and the kind of carnage that simply wouldn’t have been possible in the ’70s, while the clunky script is riddled with terrible dialogue that offers moments of so-dumb-it’s-fun entertainment. But the entire film feels ill-conceived — the implication that Leatherface left his, well, Leatherfacing behind him in the wake of the original’s deranged final reel is laughable, and a rematch between him and 1974 survivor Sally Hardesty (now played by Olwen Fouéré) stretches credulity beyond breaking point. It’s not that Texas Chainsaw Massacre doesn’t work as a legitimate continuation of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre — it feels like it takes place in an entirely different universe.
