Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Film Review
I’m not going to lie, my expectations for Texas Chainsaw Massacre were super low as it is the ninth film in a franchise that hasn’t been good for years. But even still, this movie was even worse than I expected it to be.
This horror follows Melody (Sarah Yarkin), her sister Lila (Elsie Fisher), Dante (Jacob Latimore) and his girlfriend Ruth (Nell Hudson) as they travel to a remote ghost town in Texas. They are planning to transform the abandoned town into a haven for people looking to escape the rat race. What they don’t realise is that they’re disturbing the place where Leatherface (Mark Burnham) has been hiding with his mother figure for almost 50 years.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a pointless gorefest that adds nothing new to the complicated franchise. It is hollow, dumb and makes no sense. It has been billed as a sequel to the 1974 original but there is little evidence of that. Other than the appearance of Leatherface and the original survivor Sally Hardesty (Olwen Fouere, replacing Marilyn Burns), there is no connective tissue between the two films.
It’s like the owners of this franchise saw 2018’s Halloween – a sequel to the 1978 original – and decided to copy that formula. Only Sally isn’t an iconic survivor like Jamie Lee Curtis‘ Laurie Strode, she is given barely anything to do, has no characterisation other than “battle-hardened survivor”, you don’t care if she lives or dies, and she is done very dirty by the script.
Also, they do nothing with Leatherface except make him a killing machine, whereas Halloween’s Michael Myers has this legend behind him that the new movies honour and build upon. These are small things, but I also disliked his new mask – it looked nowhere near as sinister as other instalments – and it made no sense for a man who must be around 70 years old (his original killing spree happened in 1973) to move that fast.
This is a non-stop blood bath and the kills are very gruesome, gory and there’s a lot of blood. A sequence featuring Leatherface with a busload of stupid influencers is a go-for-broke splatterfest that is the only amusing moment in the whole thing. But this hyper-violence is an attempt to compensate for the fact there’s no substance to the story. It’s also filled with dull, thin characters that you don’t care about so you don’t root for their survival. They also make so many stupid decisions that they almost deserve to bite the dust!
This film does nothing to justice its existence. It’s just a throwaway story to keep the franchise alive and it’s basically a rehash of the eight instalments that came before it. The concept isn’t that strong and it is very poorly executed. Thankfully, it’s only 83 minutes so it’s over and done with before you know it. If you’re after a mindless gorefest then you should check it out, but if you want something with substance that makes sense, look elsewhere.
On Netflix now