Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)

‘Facing Facts

Like most everything pop culture-related nowadays, this review began with TikTok. I recently joined the ADD-driven social media platform and had intended on making a three-minute video about why the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s budget would have been better spent in the hands of ten Gen-Z Tobe Hoopers. It was a slam-dunk, I thought: a breezy non-review review of a disposable, dumped-on-Netflix slasher that would deserve far less spoken words than written ones.

I abandoned* the idea after actually watching the film.

The new Texas Chainsaw is an easy target. Its wretched trailer conjures thoughts of desperate studio execs marveling at how well David Gordon Green’s Halloween movies have done, and wondering if the “direct sequel/same name” treatment would work on TCM, a property that has been more thoroughly butchered, stitched together, and hung out to rot than whichever droopy ass-cheek comprises Leatherface’s chin-piece.

The above scenario is no doubt true, if exaggerated for effect—similar to how Ed Gein’s excavation adventure in the 1950s inspired Hooper’s house of Texan ghouls in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 20 years later. But just because a film is born of cynicism and greed, doesn’t mean it can’t wind up as something noteworthy, even by accident.

Such is the case with David Blue Garcia’s new film, which ignores the 80s and 90s sequels (parts 2, 3, and 4); Marcus Nispel’s 2003 remake; its 2006 prequel; the 3-D requel from 2013, and 2017’s “I Was a Teenage Leatherface” reimagining.

Given that heap of random parts, I don’t blame the filmmakers for ignoring everything but Hooper’s first movie, either. In fact, Garcia and screenwriter Chris Thomas Devlin (mostly) ditch the idea of mining familiar characters and plot threads in favor of a new story that, while iffy in its connection to the original, works surprisingly well on its own merits.

The ghost town of Harlow, Texas (6 hours from Austin, we’re told) has been purchased by a collective of idealist social media influencers who dream of building a utopia away from big-city violence, prejudice, and congestion. The new Harlow will feature a hip restaurant, a comic book store, a spa, and whatever else the busload of wealthy young bidders can sink their SuperChat cash into.

Complications arise when the chief investors, a superstar cooking-channel duo named Dante (Jacob Latimore) and Melody (Sarah Yarkin), realize they have a pair of unwanted tenants in one of their properties: an elderly orphanage owner, played by Alice Krige, and her last charge, a mentally disturbed septuagenarian giant. After several testy exchanges about who actually owns the building, the old lady suffers a fatal heart attack…and we’re off to the races.

Or, more to the point…off with the faces.

You may wonder how this lines up with the Leatherface we last saw in 1974, swinging angrily away in the early morning sun after having lost his final victim to a passing pickup truck. I wondered that, too, and it bugged me for a good fifteen minutes—until my inner Basil Exposition happened along and advised me not to think about it too much. But since we’re here…

Fifty years ago, Leatherface was a grown man living in a remote farmhouse with his hitchhiker brother, roadside entrail-preneur father, and vampiric husk of a grandpa. When a group of carefree hippies wandered onto the Sawyer property (while exploring one of their own family’s neglected homes down the way), the cannibal family asserted dominance by capturing, torturing, and serving up trespasser paté.

As the new film opens, we’re treated to an America’s Most Wanted-style recap of these events, with a narrative ellipse about how Leatherface (and presumably his kin) were never caught. Which makes one wonder how a grown man in his mid-twenties wound up in an orphanage—and why he appears in group photos with other children, in which he looks like he could have been one of them (granted, his face is scratched out, spooky-style).

Apparently, he’d also given up eating people and making “body art” for five decades, settling into the role of the old lady’s shadowy protector. It isn’t until her untimely death that Leatherface snaps back into psycho-killer mode. Indeed, it appears as if the orphanage’s matriarch wasn’t aware of his grisly past. A lesser movie (indeed, many of the sequels pulled this) would have seen her siccing him on the annoying hipster interlopers. But, no, turns out she was a small-town innocent with a big (if not very robust) heart.

Speaking of PTSD triggers, we catch up with Sally Hardesty, lone survivor of the original massacre. She’s now a Texas Ranger who we meet in pretty much the same manner as Chuck Norris in Delta Force—hanging out in a secluded ranch, doing macho stuff until breaking news calls her back into action. With the 2014 passing of Marilyn Burns, who originated the role, Olwen Fouéré wears the ten-gallon hat and the spurs here. She plays Sally as a haunted panther waiting to strike (rounding out the Chuck Norris trifecta).

It’s the same treatment Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode has received in the new Halloween sequilogy, and Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor got in Terminator Dark Fate: the once-timid Final Girl reimagined as a nails-spitting, estrogen-fueled Abrams tank of vengeance. The hard truth is that, like those other yesteryear genre icons, Sally Hardesty is a seventy-something rake facing down the personification of evil.** While she gets off a few good shots, she’s still no match for the human grizzly bear wielding a chainsaw with six-shooter ease. It’s refreshing to see a confrontation in which a killer who smashes people’s heads into jelly doesn’t magically forfeit their lethality when taking on grandma.

Some argue that the filmmakers disrespect Sally Hardesty by having Leatherface casually fling her limp body into a literal trash pile. I see it differently. The disrespect began with the decision to resurrect her character in the first place. In Sally’s brief appearance at the end of Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (which, yes, we’ve established is no longer canon—but stay with me), she’s a vegetable who never recovered from her run-in with the Sawyers. Resurrecting Sally for the sole purpose of adding to the badass woman pantheon is more aspirational than plausible, and makes about as much sense as Leatherface living in an orphanage after the events of 1974.

Much is made of the fact that Sally Hardesty has been a Texas Ranger for decades, awaiting the chance to bring her attackers to justice. All well and good, but I love the fact that Garcia and Devlin make the case for Sally not being the best Texas Ranger—perhaps even a poor one (relying exclusively on shotguns for close-quarters fighting, heading into a murder spree without backup, etc., etc., etc.). Like the Rob character in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, who sets out on a mission of revenge against the masked psycho who killed his sister, Hardesty finds out the hard way that bloodlust and a weapons cache don’t guarantee victory over evil incarnate (or clumsiness).

Again, the lesson is: Don’t Bring Sally Back!

(But if you do, be honest about her prospects).

The weird thing is, Sally’s not even the main character here. That honor is split between Melody (one half of New Harlow’s founding duo) and her younger sister, Lila (Elsie Fisher). Much has been made of Melody being “the new Franklin”, Sally Hardesty’s wailing, obnoxious, wheelchair-bound sibling in the first movie. There’s definitely an argument there, for the first twenty minutes: she’s got a hair-trigger temper; exudes entitlement, and, like the rest of her xennial cadre, is woke to the point of being human coffee. Unlike Franklin, though, she actually becomes the penultimate Final Girl.

And during her journey, a miracle happens.

Instead of being just another vapid dead-meat, Melody proves to be tough, resourceful, and even vulnerable as self-awareness dawns on her throughout this unrelenting night of hell. She feels genuinely guilty about having caused the old lady’s heart attack, and even tells Leatherface that she wishes she could take it back (at least, that’s how I remember it). And when I say that she’s “tough” and “resourceful”, I don’t mean that this city-bred twenty-something magically becomes a weapons expert and/or martial arts master. I mean that her survival instincts kick in, propelling her through nerves-shattering danger that she escapes mostly through chance— much as Sally did in Chain Saw ‘74.

I’ve noticed that the complaints against Melody, Andre, and the whole influencer caravan tend to come from people of my generation, i.e. old fogies whose formative years were the Golden Era of Leatherface, Freddy, Jason, and Pinhead. I hate to break it to ya, fellas, but our time is past. Much in the same way fans of 50s sci-fi monster movies decried John Carpenter’s The Thing in 1982 as being a vulgar interpretation of a “classier” work, it’s not hard to imagine viewers in the Chainsaw ‘22 demo relating to these characters (many of whom we spend a decent amount of time with and get to know), while laughing at the dry, barely-on-screen-before-getting-bludgeoned-or-meathooked gang from Hooper’s film. Don’t get me wrong: I love the docu-esque hangout feel of the original. But the most we learn about Teri McMinn’s Pam is that she’s into astrology.

You may find Dante and Melody’s vision for New Harlow naive and rather dumb, but it’s undeniably fascinating (and based in reality). Hell, I’d watch a non-horror movie about kids reclaiming an old town with new values. It could either become Google-as-Main-Street or the next Fyre Festival. Not that Melody and Dante are swindlers; they’re just kids whose optimism and insta-fame have blinded them to the necessity of details—like making sure a key legal document isn’t sitting in an apartment 6 hours away. Much like Hooper’s kids, they are the new generation stampeding into the past, encountering a culture they don’t consider intact enough to understand or to save from the bulldozer (as illustrated by a tastefully handled D plot about Confederate flags).

Another criticism of Garcia’s film is its alleged anti-gun messaging. I can understand this point of view from someone who turned off Chainsaw ‘22 a third of the way in (probably not as rare as one might think). But for those paying even a little bit of attention, the filmmakers don’t appear to have much of a 2A stance at all. True, Elsie Fisher’s Lila is shown to have a severe aversion to firearms—understandable since she’d been wounded in a mass-casualty school shooting. And though many of New Harlow’s influencers likely believe they would either become murderers or catch COVID from simply touching a pistol grip, the film makes a great case for the handiness of guns in certain situations. Let’s just say the film’s climax doesn’t involve fisticuffs or strongly worded letters of complaint.

I’ve spent a lot of pixels talking about what Texas Chainsaw Massacre isn’t.

So, what is it?

It’s a lean and very mean throwback thriller that would have been right at home in, say, 2006. If you remove the branding and just think of it as a movie about kids encountering an imbalanced septuagenarian orphan, it works extremely well. The infamous bus massacre (whose artistry has been, sadly, overshadowed by a lame joke about Leatherface being “canceled”) recalls the splatterific mix of fun and horror in Freddy Vs. Jason’s cornfield rave or Darth Vader’s rebel beatdown at the end of Rogue One. Bodies are chopped, halved, and fused together in a spectacular display of practical bloodletting that recalls Hooper’s carnage carnival, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.

And in a moment of something resembling poignancy, Catherine (Jessica Allain), the bank representative who’d worked with Dante and Melody to establish New Harlow, gets taken out. Authority figures in movies like this are untrustworthy, and as talk of investments and missing deeds swells in the first act, I’d fully expected Catherine to reveal herself as a two-faced exploiter of her utopian clients. No, she’s just an honest businesswoman who believes in her customers’ vision—a vision that happens to get almost everyone killed.

This is also the rare genre film that treats southerners with dignity and nuance. There’s not an overtly racist cop in sight; the scary-looking gas station attendant turns out to be a courteous (in his way) character, and the film’s greatest red herring, a handyman contractor named Richter (Moe Dunford) isn’t a droopy, leering inbred freak who mumbles his disapproval of “them college kids” in a barely intelligible drawl. He’s actually a hunk who knows his way around everything from truck engines to assault rifles. One of the benefits of his appearing in a Texas Chainsaw sequel is the writers’ ability to play with audience expectations of who that character will turn out to be.

A dashing young Matthew McConaughey played a version of this part in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation—except he, of course, turned out to be part of Leatherface’s killer-cannibal family. This was an evolution of Edwin Neal’s hitchhiker, who had no game when trying to ingratiate himself with Sally and her friends in Chain Saw ‘74. Next Generation asked, “What if The Hitchhiker looked like someone the doomed kids would want to pick up?” Honey instead of vinegar, as it were.

Chainsaw ‘22 asks, “What if franchise tropes and cultural prejudice prevented audiences from even considering this character to be a potential hero?” Much like Catherine the banker, we keep waiting for Richter’s heel turn, and when it doesn’t come we feel (or should feel) just as guilty as the kids in the movie who thought him untrustworthy simply because of his occupation and where he came from.

Please don’t mistake my praise for the film as an assertion that it’s high art. There’s plenty to wince at here. Between the chainsaw Leatherface retrieves from a hiding spot behind a wall (which starts immediately, by the way, even after God knows how many years of neglect); to Dante’s superhuman ability to survive a gnarly chainsaw attack, and an ending that—

Note: If you’ve read this far, you’ve either seen the movie, won’t see the movie, or don’t care at all about spoilers. You’re also very patient, and I thank you.

Let’s talk about the ending. Just as the last ten seconds of 2018’s A Quiet Place knocked that nearly perfect film down an entire peg in my estimation, the closing minute of Chainsaw ‘22 undermines all of the goodwill built up around the Melody character up till that point.

If you can shake off your initial disdain for the acerbic twenty-something, you might find that she undergoes a genuine transformation during the film. Though Lila gets the prime Final Girl moments, there’s nothing remarkable about seeing a timid girl rise to the occasion of defeating the maniac after just about everyone else has been butchered. It’s a genre staple.

As I said before, Melody repents for her transgression against the old lady; she also displays increasing amounts of cunning, courage, and selflessness as the movie goes on—something not even the most hardened horror cynic could have predicted from this character’s introduction. She should have been a dead-meat—indeed one of the goriest, most painfully taken out dead-meats, the kind audiences stand up and cheer for having been removed from the story.

She should’ve been Franklin.

But Melody survives to almost the very end. After Lila takes out Leatherface, the sisters pour themselves into a self-driving car and begin the long journey home. Almost immediately, Leatherface shows up out of nowhere, yanks Melody out of the car, and decapitates her. Lila, of course, climbs through the sunroof, screaming as the vehicle continues its way out of town—a “cute” 2022 twist on Sally Hardesty’s pickup truck rescue from 1974.

It’s a sour, ugly note tacked onto a movie that doesn’t deserve it. Sure, Garcia and company have thrown plenty of gnarly things onto the screen, but until this moment they hadn’t devolved into overt nihilism. To relentlessly beat up on Melody (literally as well as figuratively in the way she’s portrayed early on), only to get taken out in the most hellish fashion as she crosses the finish line—it doesn’t exactly feel like gaslighting, and it doesn’t feel exactly like misogyny. But there’s something unsettling about the way Texas Chainsaw ‘22 spits a bloody loogie on the concept of redemption that makes me kind of hate the whole endeavor.

I don’t hate that aspect of the movie enough to not recommend it (there are far worse ways to spend an hour and twenty minutes), but you have my blessing to cut things off when Lila starts the car.

The fact that no filmmaker will ever capture the rawness and reality of Tobe Hooper’s original Massacre won’t prevent studios from cashing in on the Leatherface mythos for generations to come. Sure, an enterprising filmmaker can get all edgy with the ingredients (by, say, removing just about all references to cannibalism from the cannibal-family movie). That doesn’t change the fact that we’re dealing with a franchise, a brand—replete with action figures, playing cards, and refrigerator magnets.

There’s no use complaining that the next sequel, prequel, or remake isn’t as good as Hooper’s classic. They aren’t capable of surpassing it, only reminding audiences of the original’s greatness. If you’ve ever had filet mignon, your mind simply cannot be blown by a McDonald’s cheeseburger.

Getting back to my initial TikTok idea: Brands are gonna brand. It would be nice if some of that studio cash trickled down to filmmakers sitting on the next stunning, singular vision of horror. But for the foreseeable future (as audiences grow increasingly risk-averse with their physical and mental capital, it seems***), the best we can hope for is a rephrasing of the Sally Hardesty lesson:

Don’t do it. But if you’re going to do it, do it like this.

* TikTok is fun. An utter waste of time and a downright sinful diversion in a world of invading armies and starving children, sure, but fun nonetheless—meaning I may still make that Texas Chainsaw opinion video (minus 80% of the vitriol as conceived).

**Leatherface’s morality has always been up for debate. He’s clearly a maniac with zero regard for human life. This technically puts him in the same category as Jason, Freddy, and Michael Myers. But there are distinctions. Freddy Krueger was a pederast and murderer in life, granted unspeakable powers in death. Jason Voorhees was a mentally challenged young boy whose drowning death sent his mother into a murderous rage; her murder twisted him into an instrument of unkillable homicidal rage. Michael Myers is, according to Dr. Loomis (and, later, the [ugh, shivers] Thorn cult) an empty vessel that was filled up early on by pure evil.

Leatherface fits somewhere along that spectrum. Some films express a weird, tragic form of pity toward the mentally challenged, sexually confused boy who was warped by an amoral cannibal family. Others play up his Jason-like killing sprees without emphasizing his tragic past as much. Chainsaw ‘22 further splinters that dynamic: recalling Leatherface’s roots in abuse and drawing upon the triggering event of the one nurturing parental figure in his life dying in his arms—before going full-on slasher-movie-monster-mode after act one. He may not be what we classically think of the personification of evil, but he is, like his pop-horror compatriots, an unreasoning, murderous beast who must be put down.

***I have no idea if this is true. But the studios’ output indicates that their executives believe it’s true.