#Texas chain saw massacre film movie

Most of his followers have not been so blessed with talent.Īlthough Garcia and his collaborators aren’t really trying for that brutal simplicity either, constantly cluttering their landscape with half-baked ideas. Imbuing such a basic premise with intense, unrelenting terror takes a certain kind of instinctual craftsmanship that Hooper had.

#Texas chain saw massacre film movie

I think the problem is that the first movie is so effective in its simplicity-a vision of ordinary people plunged into Hell-that filmmakers since have thought that copying that simple template is easy. There’s no tension, no suspense, no characters to care about. The gore is plentiful, but the staging and execution of the violence is uninspired.

Everything is shallow in a film that runs under 80 minutes without credits and yet feels twice as long.Īnd that lack of narrative depth would be fine if “TCM” was effective as a horror movie. And then when it starts to play with social media in one morbidly funny scene, it throws that idea away too.

The idea of city folk who don’t understand what waits for them when they leave the safety of their home is common in horror and was partially defined by Hooper’s film, but this one adds nothing new. For example, Lila is a survivor of a school shooting, but this just ends up feeling exploitative instead of insightful. “TCM” is constantly playing this incredibly frustrating game-bringing something up and then almost refusing to do anything with it. Casting Leatherface as a bogeyman in the heartland of Texas, a figure who inspires not only fear but a bizarre fan base who buy corkscrews with chainsaws on them, is a clever idea. “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” starts with promise. It turns out that she’s the Norma Bates of this situation, and when she’s forced from her home, her son Leatherface ( Mark Burnham) goes on a rampage. (The bus may as well say “Chainsaw Victims” on the side.) When they arrive, they run into immediate conflict with a homeowner ( Alice Krige) who insists that she’s not leaving. They’re even bringing in a bus of influencers to see the space. (I’m not kidding.) Melody ( Sarah Yarkin), her sister Lila ( Elsie Fisher), and their friend Dante ( Jacob Latimore) have come to the middle of nowhere in Harlow, Texas to renovate the small town. Leatherface deserves better.īelieve it or not, “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is another cautionary tale about gentrification. It’s a startling misfire, a movie that fundamentally fails at almost everything it’s trying to do. It’s one of those projects that’s clearly been through the wringer in terms of production-there were stories of a replaced directing team and horrible test screenings-and yet it feels like it was doomed from the beginning. Everything about David Blue Garcia’s film is “sorta just barely” (other than the gore, which is impressive). She’s been trying to find the creature who killed her friends for years, and the Netflix Original sets them against each other. In this case, it’s Sally Hardesty ( Olwen Fouéré, replacing Marilyn Burns, who passed in 2014), the only person who made it out alive in Tobe Hooper’s earth-shaking original. Once again, there’s a sequel that skips all the previous films and remakes but the first movie, and it’s designed to center the story of a survivor. It’s clear as day that the producers of “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” saw David Gordon Green’s 2018 reboot of “Halloween” and thought they could accomplish the same kind of comeback for Leatherface.