Face to face

Another day, another chainsaw massacre. (Unmarked Spoilers)

Melody (Sarah Yarkin) is a young chef who has traveled to a small town of Harlowe along with her younger sister Lila (Elsie Fisher) and others. They’re planning on auctioning off the property of the town, but then they meet Virginia (Alice Krige), a resident still living in an orphanage with her son, Leatherface (Mark Burnham). After getting into a dispute about who owns the property, Virginia has a heart attack and later dies. 

In the intervening years since the first movie, Leatherface has been attempting to be good at the behest of his mom. Previously, female relatives of Leatherface were shown to be just as evil as their male compatriots. Except possibly Darla (Tonie Perensky), who seemed to be suffering from some form of Stockholm syndrome. Of course, once Virginia dies, resistance is futile and he quickly goes on the warpath. 

This version of Leatherface takes after his more consciously vicious incarnations, like in the 2003 remake. Also similar to the remake, he’s basically Jason Voorheese in a skin mask. Besides the mommy love, he’s now teleporting offscreen constantly. He’s also now strong enough to snap a man’s wrist The Fly style and able to shrug off multiple fatal injuries. Do you remember in the original, where he was just an unusually resilient guy and not Superman? I missed that.

The number of characters that I wanted to see survive was basically zero, a result of our main characters being a bunch of “smug, self-righteous, rich, city folk” who are not only unlikable, but poorly written too. The only one who has any sort of depth is Lila, who’s the survivor of a school shooting. And I suppose Melody, who feels the need to coddle her sister because again, survivor of a school shooting.

A character returning to the franchise is Sally Hardesty (Olwen Fouéré), except she too still has little in the way of characterization. She’s become a Texas Ranger, been hunting Leatherface for revenge, quotes the bible, and uses the sister’s as bait to catch Leatherface. So essentially she’s a female version of Lt. Lefty Enright (Dennis Hopper), minus all the scenery chewing. That’s it. They didn’t want to further develop her by giving her a family or an opportunity to show an emotional range beyond anger and sadness.

That might be my biggest problem with this movie. Halloween (2018) showed them how to do it right and they still f****d it up. Of course, they never could have hoped to live up to the success of that movie because if you really want to exploit your audience’s nostalgia, you can’t just bring back the original character, you need to bring back the original actor too. That’s why You No Weaving in The Matrix Resurrections falls flat. And unfortunately, Gunnar Hansen and Marilyn Burns were unable to return as Leatherface and Sally on account of being much too dead.

I’m not even a fan of this series and I’m still upset with this movie. Sally has probably five minutes of screen time before dying after a brief fight with Leatherface. There’s also no grandpa, no dinner scene or cannibalism of any kind, and no door slam. They couldn’t have thought those elements had been done to death, because they still do that flashbulb sound effect. The end credits also cut off Leatherface when he’s just getting started on his chainsaw dance.

john Larroquette, whose voice has aged like a fine wine, does return to do some more narration. It’s part of an in-universe documentary that recaps the first movie. So instead of an opening crawl, the narration is done over a video. Except it looks like something a journalism student could have made, which was the moment I knew this movie was going to suck. I forgot about this, but the start of Texas Chainsaw 3D does do a good job of getting you pumped with it’s recap, only to then immediately squander that with the rest of the movie.

The setting of this film is a ghost town, which is quite the upgrade from the farmhouse in the original, but still evokes this create feeling of isolation and purgatory. Certainly the film uses that it’s advantage by having the characters running and hiding all around the place, right? No, they primarily stick to two or three buildings. We don’t get any great set piece moments until the climax, which is set in a rundown theatre.

Now, there is one part of this movie that I do like and it’s the ending. After killing Leatherface, the sisters are riding off into the sunset, cracking jokes, only for it to turn out that Leatherface isn’t dead. He shows up, yanks Melody out the window, and cuts her head off with a chainsaw to Lila’s horror. That’s so mean-spirited, but I think that’s why I love it.

Even without Hansen and Burns, this movie still has enough of the right ingredients to work, but it doesn’t even meet my bare minimum of expectations. I wouldn’t call this the worst installment of the franchise, though I did have to think about it. All the positive reviews I’ve seen have mentioned how gory it is, so if you’re looking for that, it’s the only reason I would recommend this movie.