Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(2022) 81 min
Rated: R (blood, gore)
Country: USA
Director: David Blue Garcia
Starring: Sarah Yarkin, Elsie Fisher, Mark Burnham, Moe Dunford, Olwen Fouéré
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
A sequel to the original 1974 film. This one takes place fifty years later as the abandoned town of Harlow gets investors and influencers ready to purchase the town.
Synopsis:
Nearly fifty years have passed since the original slayings by Leatherface in the first film. Sally Hardesty (Fouéré), the sole survivor, has become a Texas Ranger and tried to hunt for Leatherface, but never found him.
A group of young influencers and entrepreneurs go to the abandoned town of Harlow to auction off old buildings in an attempt to make a trendy gentrified area. Dante is a chef and travels with his girlfriend Ruth. They also travel with two sisters named Melody (Yarkin) and Lila (Fisher). Lila survived a school shooting and Melody is slightly over-protective of her.
Dante meets the town contractor and mechanic Richter (Dunford).
While looking around the town Lila spots an old confederate flag on a building and the group moves to remove it. The building is the old Harlow Orphanage. An old woman named Ginny lives inside along with a tall hulking silent man. The group remove the flag and Dante tells the woman that she doesn’t own the house.
Ginny starts to panic as two sheriffs enter the house and try to escort her out. She vomits and starts to have a heart attack. The large silent man comes down the stairs and picks her up off the ground. She’s placed in the back of the van with the man and one of the officers. The other officer drives the van and Ruth gets into the shotgun seat to ride along to the hospital.
Meanwhile, Richter removes the flag just as a bus full of potential investors arrives. Dante and Melody start schmoozing with the social media influencers and investors while Lila wanders off alone.
Back in the van, Ginny dies and the large man gets angry and breaks the sheriff’s arm, then stabs his throat with his own broken arm bone shards. He also wrestles with a gun which fires off directly into the driving sheriff’s throat. Ruth watches in horror as they crash into a harvesting machine in the middle of a large sunflower field.
Lila wanders into Richter’s garage and looks at his automatic rifle. She reveals that she’s been through a school shooting that has left her terrified of guns. Melody reads Ruth’s last text to her that informs her that Ginny died. Feeling guilty, Melody tells Lila of the death and prepares to leave with her sister.
Back in the field, the man rips the face off of Ginny and wears it, becoming Leatherface. Ruth desperately tries to radio for help, but no one responds. Leatherface walks to the front of the van and kills the sheriff for good as well as stabbing Ruth to death by slicing her belly.
In Harlow, Richter takes away the keys from Dante and refuses to return them until Dante can prove that Ginny’s house belongs to them. However, Dante fails to find the deed among his records and Lila suggests that they search Ginny’s home for the deed.
A gas station owner who overheard Ruth’s pleads over the sheriff’s radio calls Sally Hardesty to tell her about Leatherface’s return.
Dante and Melody enter the orphanage to look for the deed. Melody finds the deed locked in a box. Meanwhile Dante gets his face slashed by Leatherface with a meat cleaver. As Dante bleeds out on the floor, Melody sees him and Leatherface and tries to hide. Melody manages to hide from Leatherface as he starts to hammer a hole in a wall.
As night falls a rain storm starts. Dante gains consciousness and gets off the floor wandering into the street. Richter finds him and tells the investors to stay on the bus. Richter pulls his gun out of his holster and starts to look for the person who hurt Dante. Richter wanders into the orphanage and sees the blood on the floor. He makes his way upstairs where Leatherface and Melody are. Leatherface has found his chainsaw hidden in the wall of the house. He hears Richter come up the stairs and the two have a scuffle, where Leatherface manages to break Richter’s leg with a hammer and Richter pushes Leatherface against a window. Leatherface then pushes Richter onto a shard of broken window pane and slices his throat. As Richter bleeds out onto the floor, he tries to give the keys back to Melody who is hiding under a nearby bed. Leatherface finishes Richter off by obliterating his skull with a hammer.
Sally drives up to the scene of the crash in the sunflower field and sees the dead bodies strewn around. She follows a small path in the field and finds Ginny’s body propped up in a sitting position without her face. Sally is shaken but tries to press on with her investigation.
Melody gets the keys and tries to sneak around the house quietly but Leatherface hears her and knocks her into floor which breaks beneath her. The hole formed is large enough for Melody to fall into the crawlspace beneath the house. Melody climbs under the house while Leatherface chases her with his chainsaw, sawing through the floorboards. Luckily Lila sees Melody and opens a grate, helping Melody out of the house. The two run through the pouring rain back to the bus.
The bus driver attempts to leave the town, but the bus breaks down. The driver goes out of the bus to check the engine and Leatherface tosses his severed head back into the bus, scaring the people inside. Leatherface climbs into the bus and starts to saw through the people inside.
Melody and Lila are able to escape through a window in the roof of the restroom on the bus. They flag down the next car they see which happens to be Sally’s car. The pair climb into the back of her SUV, but she locks them inside, telling them to wait while she kills Leatherface.
Sally tries to confront Leatherface in his house but feels he doesn’t remember her or her friends. He ignores her and moves past her to go outside the house.
As he goes outside after hearing Lila and Melody screaming in the SUV. Sally hands the car keys to the girls and tell them to leave. Leatherface manages to run his chainsaw through Sally’s abdomen after she attempts to shoot him. The sisters get in the car and try to run over Leatherface, instead they crash into Richter’s garage.
Melody is pinned down by a metal bar inside the car and she tells Lila to run. Leatherface walks up to the car and Melody apologizes for Ginny’s death. Just as Leatherface is about to kill her, Lila taunts him with a gun. It doesn’t fire and she tries to run away as Leatherface begins to chase her.
Sally manages to shoot Leatherface as she lies dying and he runs away from the street and hides inside the local defunct movie theater. Sally gives her shotgun to Lila telling her not to run because he will always haunt her.
As Lila tries to find Leatherface in the old movie theater, he surprises her and they both fall into a hole in the floor filled with water. Somehow Lila emerges and tries to crawl for the gun that was dropped. Leatherface also emerges and drags Lila back. He reaches for his chainsaw but Melody appears and tries to grapple him from behind before he can hurt Lila. Lila grabs the gun and shoots Leatherface. Melody grabs the chainsaw manages to knock Leatherface back, clipping his face slightly. He falls into the water hole and sinks down releasing air bubbles.
The sister hug and make their way back to Dante’s car. It’s daytime now and the siblings set the car on autopilot to drive back to Austin. Just as they are leaving Leatherface punches through the window and grabs Melody. He cuts off her head with his chainsaw and holds it high as Lila screams in horror as the car continues to drive off.
In an after credits sequence, Leatherface walks towards his old house in a Texas field.
Review:
A sequel (If you forget all the other films in the franchise) that doesn’t cover some huge plot holes and also offers a convoluted story.
This film seemed to want to have something to say, but it was just so badly written that nothing noteworthy was said. The sisters point of view could have been more meaningful if their characters were fleshed out beyond a cloying older sister and a broken younger sister. That’s too much character depth for this film, though. Everything is superficial since the real star is Leatherface and gore. Even the return of Sally to the franchise doesn’t really help much. She’s billed as a tough woman, but at the first moment to confront Leatherface she simply stares at him and allows him to walk off.
The camera usage and set design was fairly decent given that this is a horror genre movie. It was definitely more cinematic than previous installments. Unfortunately nice lighting, coloring and props don’t help when the story has problems. The jarring edits between horror scenes and plot progression scenes made the tone uneven and killed most of the tension.
All of the proposed jokes about gun violence, social media, cancel culture and gentrification fell flat and will no doubt look dated as time goes by. Did our Final Girl Lila learn anything by the end of the film? Was there even a message?
This film does have plenty of gore served up fairly regularly, so if you’re into that kind of thing it’s worth a watch. There’s a little bit in the way of jumpscares and suspense. The only actually chilling scene was when Sally discovers Ginny’s body which was actually quite effective. This film is somewhat forgettable, but still not the worst in this franchise. It can only be mildly recommended as a film to watch if there’s no better horror fare to see or if you’re a fan of the franchise.