The latest sequel to the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre is nasty, brutish, and short. And for those reasons, I rather liked it. It didn’t overstay its welcome at all of 73 minutes and it reveled in being this dark, sadistic, and viscous slasher flick. It’s got problems, but I liked the core guts of it.
The film basically stars a crew of social media influencers who buy up a small ghost town in Texas in order to auction off the buildings to create, I don’t know, a dustier, hipper Austin? But before they can keep it weird, they anger the long-in-hiding boomer Leatherface who takes a chainsaw to these Gen Z hooligans who sneer at guns, the confederate flag, and Texas. Yeehaw.
The movie gets off to a rather iffy start with this group of elitist, city-folk who sneer at all the things elitist city-folk sneer at. Once again a slasher film with characters we hate so, I guess, we don’t feel bad when they get slaughtered. But there’s a core sisterhood that I liked, with one sister actually being a good person and the other growing to be a little more likable over time. Plus they exhibit a different final girl paradigm which is nice.
But the real star of the show and why I slowly came around to realizing I was enjoying it is the wanton violence. When the talking stops and the chainsaw spins up, the blood goes splattering, and the limbs go flying, the movie drops all pretense and gives us some good old fashioned over the top gore. Call it Midnight Meat Bus, but I was shocked and sickly amused by the carnage and the very well done gore effects in this flick.
And yet it’s a sequel to the original film (ignoring all other attempts) and that seems quite unnecessary. First off, Leatherface would be in his mid 70s by now? He’s almost as energetic as Michael Meyers in the latest Halloween films. And speaking of those, it has a recast final girl of the original film, now a Texas ranger who has had no luck in tracking down Leatherface these past 50 years. It feels both too famliar and too tossed in. They wanted to tell a story about hipsters, they got some septuagenarian shotgun wielding revenge too.
In the end, I was rooting for our final girls and hoping they could survive Leatherface. And that’s more than I can say for a lot of slasher flicks… much less Texas Chainsaw sequels, prequels, and remakes. This isn’t a strong recommendation, but it is a recommendation… if you don’t mind a bunch of splatter.
Score: 82