![]() But it doesn’t take long for Leatherface, his mad-child rage retriggered, to strap on his butcher’s apron and get his rampage groove back. When he reaches into the closet where Melody is hiding, and pulls out a dress that belonged to the orphanage headmistress, cradling it to his body with his bloody hands, we half expect to see a tear rolling down that dead skin mask. ![]() Since the previous two films in the franchise sort of softened Leatherface up (“Texas Chainsaw 3D” made him a sympathetic avenger, and in the coming-of-age saga of “Leatherface” he was an abuse victim), it’s hard for the new film to put the genie of Leatherface’s poor, poor pitiful backstory back in the bottle. The Leatherface masks you can buy in a costume shop are scarier. In this one, he looks like a soggy gray potato crossed with Peter Boyle. But it always bugs me when the Leatherfaces in these recycled movies wear masks that don’t look like, you know, Leatherface. ![]() That’s when the portly orphan, who was riding in the van with her, slices off her face to wear it as his own. But our righteous gentrifying heroes kick her out of the place, which causes her to have a seizure, and on the van ride to the hospital she dies. There’s even a lone aging orphan who still lives there - a familiar, portly figure we see in silhouette at the top of the stairs. They claim that she’s squatting there she says the place is still hers. Melody (Sarah Yakin) and Dante (Jacob Latimore), who are leading the mission, spot a Confederate flag hanging from an old orphanage and enter the building inside, they find the old lady who used to run it (she’s played by the venerable Alice Krige). They’re doing their bit to help America by converting a Texas ghost town into a thriving hipsterville! The plan is so impractical yet arrogant that you’re more than ready to see them all chainsawed. These yuppie missionaries have arranged to auction off the town to investors who will turn the abandoned storefronts into restaurants, galleries, comic-book stores, you name it. It’s more like a blood-soaked but unscary footnote.Ī group of Gen-Z entrepreneurs - snowflake “idealists” from Austin, with some serious venture capital behind them - show up in the Texas town of Harlow, which looks like the decaying set of an old Western. It’s set in the present day, 50 years after the original, which means that Leatherface must be pushing 70 (in his freshly cut mask of human skin, he doesn’t look a day over 65), but it would be generous to call the film a continuation of the “Chainsaw” saga. (It lessens the pain.) And there are classics of horror cinema that are notably compact, like “Frankenstein” (1931), with its twisty tumultuous plot that lasts 71 minutes, or the original 1974 version of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” which achieved its slow-burn descent into the abyss in just 83 minutes.īut the new, garishly crude, bluntly overlit, what-you-saw-is-what-you-get “ Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” which in case you’re counting is the eighth “Chainsaw” movie since the original (in the case of this series, you’d need a serious flowchart to diagram where the sequels meet the reboots meet the origin stories meet the what-the-hell-let’s-just-do-this-again whatevers), manages to carve out a scanty running time of 82 minutes simply because there isn’t much to it. I’m all for bad horror movies having short running times.
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