Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)

Directed by David Blue Garcia. Starring Elsie Fisher, Sarah Yarkin, Jacob Latimore, Moe Dunford, Olwen Fouéré, Nell Hudson, Jessica Allain, William Hope, Mark Burnham, Alice Krige, Sam Douglas, Jolyon Coy. [R]

Leatherface gets the David Gordon Green’s Halloween treatment by retconning all the Texas Chain Saw Massacre sequels and turning the first movie’s “final girl” into a hardened, vengeful senior (played here by Fouéré). It’s been almost fifty years since the cannibalistic Sawyer clan carved up and barbecued a bunch of out-of-towners, and two of those Sawyer’s happen to be holed up in a Texas ghost town in present day. When a group of entrepreneurs and investors arrive for an auction, and the elderly mother croaks from a heart attack after getting upset by their arrival, that leaves ol’ Leatherface to set things right with a little massacrin’. Don’t go looking for any old school thrills or suspenseful mayhem; this boring bloodletter is witless and derivative enough to be forgotten a moment later, there’s no tension or texture to the slick, soulless direction and aesthetics, and even at only about 75 minutes, the movie feels like an overlong drag. The lone-survivor-looking-for-a-reckoning subplot is so perfunctory that there’s no good reason for it to even exist, and the new characters aren’t worth a second glance. Modern issues/technology are poorly (and pointlessly) integrated into the rote slasher formula—school shooting trauma, cell phones, social outrage, etc. (which of the filmmakers thought it was a good idea to have a millennial record a chainsaw-wielding maniac on his phone and say, “Try anything and you’re canceled, bro”??). Even the expected references fall flat, including giving a nod to the original’s truck-bed terror finale to a random nobody. Undiscriminating gorehounds may appreciate the viscera that flies during a slice-and-dice slaughter inside a party bus, but it’s not worth wading through the tedium to get there. John Larroquette reprises his decades-old “role” as narrator. Co-written and co-produced by Fede Álvarez.

25/100