'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' (2022) Review: Another Mindless, Bloody Mess of a Horror Revival
“Try anything and you’re canceled, bro.”
If there’s one genre that’s constantly reimagining and reinventing itself more than any other, it’s horror. In the 1980s, we had slashers - gory masterpieces like Friday the 13th and John Carpenter’s Halloween franchise, which introduced audiences to the thrill of raw, bloody violence and unpredictable kills. The 90s brought a resurgence of subversive, psychological horrors such as The Sixth Sense and Ring, alongside the iconic horror/comedies of Scream. After the flood of sequels and remakes in the early 2000s came the emergence of ‘elevated’ or ‘social’ horror, with intelligent and revolutionary films like Get Out and The Invisible Man leading the way for horror to be a catalyst for social and political commentary. And now, as we firmly enter the 2020s, horror is moving in a different direction - the legacy sequel.
Although the legacy sequel wasn’t strictly born within the horror genre (franchise revivals like The Force Awakens and Jurassic World arguably created the fad first), it’s quickly growing synonymous with the genre thanks to our unrelenting enthusiasm to bring back beloved franchises and characters to cash in on the nostalgia and sentimentality of their cult-classic status. And sadly, Netflix’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre is just the next in a long, long line of carelessly constructed and thoughtlessly executed attempts to recapture the magic of their predecessor. The film rejects everything that made Tobe Hooper’s original so great, instead opting to sideline its underdeveloped and unreliable characters in order to highlight the film’s excessive brutality and meaningless kills. It completely misunderstands what audiences want from a horror film - watching characters run for their lives from a chainsaw-wielding maniac is only fun when we’re actually given a reason to care about these people, which this film completely neglects to do.
This direct sequel to the original 1974 slasher follows a group of idealistic young friends who accidentally cause the death of an elderly woman when they move into a remote Texan town. But in typical Texas Chainsaw fashion, nothing is quite as it seems as their arrival in the town draws the attention of Leatherface, who comes out of hiding for the first time in fifty years to ruin their visit. The film makes a couple of attempts to elevate its fairly basic and simplistic premise to something more meaningful, with a few scatterings of social commentary and satire that ultimately aren’t given enough support to have any sort of lasting impact. There’s a message in there somewhere about social media culture, about the many lives that are damaged as a result of careless gentrification, but the film’s unwillingness to develop these ideas leaves it feeling extremely hollow and purposeless overall.
At just over 70 minutes in length, the film is immediately making the situation difficult for itself. Whilst a short runtime can sometimes work wonders for a horror like this, that’s only ever the case when sufficient time is given to setting up the scene and offering a little exposition to get the audience engaged. Instead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre spends almost its entire runtime running through the story at a breakneck pace, making it extremely difficult to know what’s happening beyond the individual scene you’re watching at that very moment. There are several different subplots running parallel to each other, which serve no purpose other than distracting from the story that we’re all actually here to see. Maybe these side stories would have been interesting if they’d been given time to be developed and explored, but instead they ruin the tone of the movie by constantly switching from scene to scene. It’s impossible for the film to ever gather any real momentum when there are so many separate threads that need tending to every five minutes.
The only part of the film that isn’t completely mediocre is the screenplay - and that’s because it’s outright insulting. Nothing that happens in the film feels even remotely real, with characters that feel like complete caricatures of themselves and situations that feel completely manufactured solely to pay off with the inevitable kills. It walks the audience through every single step of the film with frustrating unclarity, cheesy dialogue and character decisions that make absolutely no sense at all. It takes the ‘don’t go in the dark room alone’ trope to a whole new level, making its characters practically cause their own deaths with their completely inexplicable decisions. Shouting ‘no, don’t go in there!’ at your screen is one thing, but watching characters stand completely still whilst being chased by a chainsaw-wielding, blood-stained figure wearing the face of one of his victims… that’s hard to forgive.
Overall, Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a pretty colossal disappointment. It completely dismisses everything that the franchise has done successfully up to this point, crafting a pointless and underdeveloped narrative that acts purely as a backdrop for brutal violence and shoehorned inclusion of basic, nostalgia-driven character work. With a predictable storyline and underwhelming conclusion, David Blue Garcia’s new installment adds nothing new to the franchise and is, unfortunately, one of the least interesting horror pieces we’ve seen for a long time.