By Geno McGahee
One of my favorite movies is the 1974 TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. It was a monster hit and something very unusual with a gritty no-holds-barred approach. It felt like a deranged home movie and still ranks up there with one of the most unsettling film experiences you can have.
Considering how popular it became, follow up films were destined happened and we got plenty of them. In 1986, a comedic sequel was released to mixed response. It wasn’t what most fans wanted, but it has grown some appreciation over the years. LEATHERFACE, the third entry in the series, took great influence from the popular slashers at the time and this one has grown on me over the years. TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE NEXT GENERATION was a return to some of the feel and approach of the first and is rather good despite some silly stuff.
In 2003, the Michael Bay “THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE” would be released and it was terrible and the follow up in 2006, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE BEGINNING, was even worse. I was pretty convinced that the series had died and I wasn’t too upset about it. If Hollywood was going to give us this shit, let Leatherface just vanish.
Leatherface would return in 2013 in TEXAS CHAINSAW 3D. I actually really liked this film and thought it was going in the right direction to bring back Leatherface, but it wasn’t to be. That new start to the series went relatively unnoticed. In 2017, the absolute box office bomb, LEATHERFACE, was released. It was bad. I had given up again on the series but Netflix acquired the 2022 TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. It took me a while to get around to watch it but I finally found the time…
Dante (Jacob Latimore) and Melody (Sarah Yarkin) are chefs that plan to open a restaurant in a ghost town in Texas along with trying to auction off other buildings to create a town away from conservatives and violence. Along for the ride was Dante’s future wife, Ruth (Neil Hudson) and Melody’s sister, Lila (Elsie Fisher). They start out as really obnoxious do-gooders and are assholes, immediately, to Richter (Moe Dunford), a guy that drives a big pickup truck and has a gun. The film actually does a good job here trying to present different perspectives without leaning in one way or the other.
It turns out that Lila survived a school shooting and that’s part of the reason why Melody is so anti-gun. When they arrive in the town, they start going into the buildings including an orphanage where they meet an old lady that insists that she owns it. Dante becomes a total dickhead and wants her out, noting that the house is his now. (Spoiler) The old lady actually owned the house and didn’t take it too well when she was told to get the hell out. She falls to the ground with a heart attack and is rushed to the hospital with her roommate, a big fella of not too many words.
The old lady dies in the ambulance and that drives her roommate, also known as “Leatherface” (Mark Burnham), crazy. He immediately kills everyone inside and then rips off the face of the old lady and is now wearing it. I wasn’t a huge fan of the look of the new Leatherface, but Burnham does a good job with the character.
The film now turns into a slasher film with Leatherface chasing people down and having some pretty cool kill scenes. One of the worst turned best scenes of the film is when Leatherface enters a bus full of people. They immediately start recording him with their cell phones and noting that they are going to “cancel him.” It was pretty stupid and unrealistic. Leatherface marching into any bus should make people scatter, but then again, there are a lot of stupid people out there. Maybe this shit would have happened.
The death scenes in the bus were awesome. Leatherface made use of his chainsaw and showed no mercy, but Melody and Lila would find their way out. On the run, we get a blast from the past with Sally Hardesty (Olwen Fouere), which makes it obvious that they saw the new HALLOWEEN movies. If Laurie Strode can do it, why not drag Sally Hardesty back. Like Laurie, she also wants to end the monster that have been fucking with their lives. Unlike Laurie, Leatherface forgot all about Sally. He’s moved on. She wants to fuck around and find out, and (Spoiler) she fucks around and finds out.
Sally rescues Melody and Lila but she won’t leave until she takes down Leatherface. She has her big showdown and it was a letdown and Sally gets the wrong side of the chainsaw. Melody and Lila are now behind the wheel of a truck and have a clear way out of town. Leatherface isn’t going to move his fat ass fast enough to catch up with a vehicle.
Instead of doing the right thing and getting the fuck out of there, Melody steps on the gas and crashes into Leatherface and then into a building, disabling the vehicle. Now, the two survivors have to go to war with the killer. At one point, Lila grabs a shotgun and starts shooting Leatherface, but runs out of bullets before he falls backward into some water that I think was sewage. Don’t worry, he still plunged into it.
The ending of this film is awesome. I watched it several times and found it more amusing each time.
TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE is better than I expected it to be. It’s nothing new and is it’s rather forgettable, but I enjoyed it throughout. A lot of the cinematography was awesome and the special effects were good even though a lot of it was CGI. It wasn’t bad. I am going to recommend this one. It was a pleasant surprise.
