Soon enough our band of reverse-gentrifiers has upset the last squatters in town, including an old-timer who still lives in the orphanage down the street. The big lug doesn’t ever give his Christian name to the new neighbors, but his old moniker catches on pretty quickly after he starts wearing folks’ faces and revving up his trusty chainsaw. Thus the sisters and their party bus full of friends’ only hope for survival may be the original movie’s final girl, Sally Hardesty (Olwen Fouréré), who’s grown up and become a Texas Ranger in the last half-century, waiting all this time for another dance with Leatherface.
The inclusion of Sally, and the frankly dubious development of her being both a gunslinger and so obsessed with Leatherface that she even bought the old farmhouse she almost died in five decades ago, is a poor attempt to mimic the success David Gordon Green and Blumhouse Pictures enjoyed by bringing Jamie Lee Curtis back for the 2018 Halloween reboot. And on paper, this makes a certain amount of utilitarian sense. After all, John Carpenter’s original Halloween from 1978 owes more than a little to Leatherface, and turnabout is fair play in the horror genre, no?
Unfortunately, in this case that is a hard nobecause the Michael Myers schtick has never worked for Leatherface, which is the first of many mistakes in this otherwise turgid exercise in intellectual property exploitation.
As originally played by Gunnar Hansen in the ’74 film, there is a perverse element of dark comedy and even tragedy about Leatherface, a mama’s boy who is playing the role of mama for his family full of cannibals. He doesn’t want to be killing teenagers—they just keep wandering onto his farm and ruining his Sunday dinner plans! Our hapless power tool enthusiast was never intended to be an immortal embodiment of human evil because that slasher concept hadn’t been invented yet. In fact, there’s something purely, and piteously, human about the original Leatherface.
By returning the first victim who got away to him, Netflix’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre reminds the viewer that we’re watching a geriatric serial killer chasing down victims who could be his grandkids. A smarter movie might have at least had some fun with that idea, but nothing about the reboot is smart; it’s as dumb and lumbering as the new Chainsaw-man, who right down to his new Porky Pig mask has become a self-parody.
And when the killer doesn’t work, all that’s left are those vaguely intriguing early allusions toward political allegory, even if it’s still baffling that kids eager to “cancel” someone would want to move to a part of the country where Confederate monuments are never coming down. Alas, any attempt at social commentary is also quickly abandoned in this movie’s scant 82-minute running time, leaving its “both sides are bad” themes to be as toothless as one of its victims after meeting Leatherface’s mallet.