In the small town of Harlow, Texas, some forty-odd years ago, a madman wearing a mask of human flesh murdered a group of teenagers using all manner of gruesome tools: most notably, a chainsaw.  News spread fast, and the town was left to rot with only a few local holdouts remaining.  In 2022, with high hopes for creating an idealized town, Dante (Jacob Latimore) leads an entrepreneurial project to revitalize the town with fresh, young, and hip businesses.  The locals don’t take too kindly to what is left of their town being taken over, least of all Leatherface (Mark Burnham). 

Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the Netflix-released, legacy sequel to Tobe Hooper’s iconic 1974 slasher.  Picking up the mantle is David Blue Garcia behind the camera working off a script by Chris Thomas Delvin.  At only eighty-one minutes and with some truly grisly moments, the film sounds like a home run on paper, but the messy story is so bogged down with awful character arcs and misguided motivations that make it an absolute slog to get through. 

The film fails to really introduce us to the new cast of teens in how they are all related to each other.  Dante is the lead, Melody (Sarah Yarkin) is a screeching liberal spitfire, Lila (Elsie Fisher) is a mild and timid girl with a tragic past, and Ruth (Nell Hudson) is… well, she is there.  At a gas station, they meet Ritcher (Moe Dunford), a true-blue Texan with a big, red truck.  Melody mouths off to the man in the first of many instances of pointless political inclusion.  Horror is often used to comment on politics and social topics, but with Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Delvin’s script simply sits back and points its finger at the world while failing to comment on what it is highlighting in any meaningful way.  It will do so time and time again noting that school shootings, deep political divide, and social media/influencer culture are all things that occupy our modern lives.  Because Delvin never really presents his argument on these issues but consistently treats the characters that are involved with those issues as exceptionally infantile, the script comes off as whiny and pointless musings of someone being left behind. 

What the film does well, is, as mentioned, deliver some gruesome kills.  There are some truly visceral moments in the gore that make it impossible not to at least squirm in discomfort.  Garcia has a good eye for framing these sequences, notably, one of the first kills that takes place near a two-way swinging door is exceptionally well done.  Later, Leatherface finds himself in close quarters with the potential buyers and quickly racks up the film’s body count.  More gratuitous than interesting, the sequence is well shot and signals the turning point into the final act. Being treated as the direct sequel to Hooper’s original, Burnham is exceptionally terrifying in his physical presence as Leatherface, just don’t focus on that he is portraying a man who would be in his 70’s.  

It is not a legacy sequel without bringing back some familiar faces and Olwen Fouéré takes over the role of Sally Hardesty, the lone survivor of the 1974 murder spree, then played by the late Marilyn Burns.  Sally’s role in this film is so ill-conceived and unnecessary that she should not have even been included.  Thankfully, Delvin does not hold Sally so close as many other screenwriters do with their legacy characters, but she is so unconnected to the plot that it would have been better to make this a new reboot offshoot instead of tying itself down to a source material it clearly does not regard.  To make matters worse, the entire final showdown is so clumsily laid out and, for all the promise he showed in the first two acts, Garcia’s direction is at its weakest in the final set-piece which is both nonsensical on the page and untrackable on the screen. 

Texas Chainsaw Massacre ends, poised for yet another installment, but with as rough as this film is it seems unlikely.  It is hard to recommend – fans of the franchise are likely to come away disappointed by the handling of the source material and fans of the genre may find themselves bored between the kills as they sit through the long sequences of plot with poorly developed characters which takes up much of the film’s runtime.  In this era of filmmaking where nothing is sacred as Hollywood goes back to the beginning of some of their greatest hits, Texas Chainsaw Massacre sits pretty firmly at the bottom of the barrel in terms of its necessity, but even more egregious is that it just is not a good film.