Main cast: Sarah Yarkin (Melody), Elsie Fisher (Lila), Jacob Latimore (Dante), Nell Hudson (Ruth), Moe Dunford (Richter), Olwen Fouéré (Sally Hardesty), Jessica Allain (Catherine), Alice Krige (Mrs Mc), and Mark Burnham (Leatherface)
Director: David Blue Garcia
Good lord, another one? How many times are they going to reboot Texas Chainsaw Massacre in this century alone?
Interestingly, this is not the soulless effort churned out cheap by a studio to retain the rights to this franchise. No, this is the soulless first of what is hoped to be a money-making franchise from Legendary Pictures, who had bought the rights to this franchise after Lionsgate and Millennium Films blew their ownership. So, what do these folks do to give this franchise a fresh paint? Do exactly like Halloween did: make this the sequel to the first movie (thus erasing the campy fun sequel to the original, sigh), bring back the sole survivor as some strong and empowered woman that will have a showdown with the villain, and include all the tired old horror clichés done to death by slasher films under the guise of “homage”.
Things won’t be too bad if this came out before or around the Halloween reboot, but no, this one comes out some four years later, and therefore, feels a little too much like a desperate wannabe hoping to replicate a momentary triumph achieved by another slasher franchise. Heh, I do say “momentary” because whatever goodwill Halloween achieved was flushed down the toilet with an underwhelming follow-up.
Back to this one, we have two sisters, Melody and Lila. Lila accompanies Melody and Melody’s business partner Dante along with Dante’s girlfriend Ruth to Harlow, where Melody and Dante are hoping to own the properties there and turn the place into a gentrified retreat that will appeal to hipsters and make them a lot of money. They clash with Mrs Mc, who refuses to leave the orphanage that she is living in, until Mrs Mc dies of a heart attack. Oops, turns out that the silent and burly fellow living with her is Leatherface, and now he’s berserk and out for blood, guts, entrails, and more.
The plot of this one reminds me of Texas Chainsaw 3D, another one of the tedious parade of remakes or reboots or sequels or whatever in these two decades, in that it misguidedly tries to turn Leatherface into some kind of poor, woe-is-me fellow that is at the right side of the social justice parade. In this case, he’s just killing off those greedy people that want to swoop in into middle-class folks’ lives and disrupt everything just to sate their own greed. So what if he happened to be a psychopath that kills people in gruesome ways? He’s killing the right people, so or the movie wants us to believe, so… yay?
It’s all pretty dumb, because Leatherface functions very well as he is, as the fearsome killer, without people trying to portray him as some kind of antihero. Besides, everyone knows antiheroes only work when they are hot and brooding, and this fellow is anything but that.
This one has some nice gore, but its biggest problem is this: whatever it does, Halloween has done better, and it is way too easy to compare these two movies because the script for this one seems to be based quite blatantly on the same tropes and twists and turns present in the other movie.
Furthermore, this movie rehashes the tropes and elements present and done so many times already in previous movies that have Texas Chainsaw in the titles, so much so that this one comes off like a soulless made-by-committee film from people that just want to do something minimal based on what has worked before.
As a result, there isn’t much here that feels new or even a little unpredictable. Oh yes, the moody, not-so-pretty young woman that has a tragic background (the only main character with any semblance of back story, really) is the final girl, which I’m sure most people would see that coming the moment the main characters are introduced.
At the end of the day, this one is not exactly dead on arrival, as it does have some nice gore to please folks that aren’t asking for much else. More like meh on arrival.
