Let’s play a game. It’s called “State the Obvious.”
You have a second attempt at a reboot of a horror franchise that started almost 40 years ago, distributed by Lionsgate (the people who milked the whore-cow of a franchise Saw into oblivion) and the film is in 3D. It’s safe to say this movie won’t be winning too many awards.
The film follows the original in the series, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, directly jumping into the aftermath of the original story as the Sawyer family is attacked by a vigilante mob as retribution for the horrific nature of the crimes committed by one of their own, young Jed (Leatherface). Spoiler alert: Leatherface doesn’t die within the first two minutes.
Cut to 20 years later—which, oddly enough, is the present day in the timeline of the film—and you have a young woman who gets a house mysteriously left to her in another state by an aunt she never knew she had. Wondering “what could possibly go wrong?” the girl, whose name isn’t even worth remembering, finds Leatherface in the home, as he kills her friends one by one.
This movie has a lot of problems, and I’m not going to waste your time listing them all off. I will say, however, that trying to make a cannibalistic, psychotic transvestite more likeable to commercial audiences may not have been the most intelligent decision, nor does it suffice public perception to try and blame his crimes against morality on his mental retardation.
The kills are un-involving, the characters are weak; the movie asks you to buy too much, and can only boast the involvement of former actors in the Chainsaw series, Bill Moseley, Gunnar Hansen and what may or may not have been Brian Doyle Murray. The whole paradigm of “human meat” has been removed entirely, and at the end of the day, this franchise will probably get remade again so “someone can get it right.”
This seems to be a problem concurrent with the horror genre, and it appears that the latest victim of Leatherface’s reign is himself, killed not with a chainsaw but with a lack of creativity.
