Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) - The show musn’t go on

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David Blue Garcia directs the latest Texas Chainsaw Massacre, an unremarkable addition that is once again confirmation the franchise should have stopped about seven instalments ago. Running at just under an hour and a half, it is nevertheless rambling, uninspiring, attempting a culture clash storyline that only succeeds in grossly caricaturising the Texan countryside and the modern influencer trope.

Nearly fifty years after Leatherface’s original killing spree, Melody (Sarah Yarkin) and Dante (Jacob Latimore) embark on a moneymaking business to turn the desolate town of Harlow, Texas, into a gentrified area, complete with restaurant, hairdressers, motels and whatnot. Despite the fact that Harlow isn’t exactly connected, to anything, they are bright, motivated and ready to make a difference. Accompanied by Melody’s sister Lila (Eighth Grade’s Elsie Fisher) and Dante’s girlfriend Ruth (Nell Hudson), the foursome are the stand-in for “Modern” – they are influencers, have phones, know how to run a business. In direct contrast are the Texans, straight out of 1973, where it all began – suspicious policemen who only loosen up when Melody and Lila reveal they have connections to their homeland; local mechanic Richter (Moe Dunford), whose sole purpose seems to be to repair a car in an abandoned barn; and the elderly Ginny (Alice Krige), who owns the orphanage Melody and Dante are planning on transforming into a modern nail salon or something. When Ginny puts up a fight for her home, supported by an imposing figure, “the last of her boys” standing eerily at the top of the stairs, an argument breaks out and she suffers a heart attack. Ruth volunteers to accompany her in the ambulance along with her boy who, you’ve guessed it, is the same Leatherface from so long ago. Regardless of the fact that he is now approaching eighty according to the franchise timeline, Leatherface is as chirpy as ever, and soon he’s attacking everything that moves, including our influencer heroes.

Credit: allocine.fr

There are exactly two acceptable points in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: the first is a scene in which Leatherface makes meat out of a group of potential investors living it out on a bus. It’s messy, it’s gory, and there’s something almost art-house about the neon blue and purple lights that clad the coach as Leatherface wields his famous chainsaw. The problem is that it is more amusing than scary, once again pertaining to the culture clash trope in which even the threat of “cancellation” doesn’t faze Leatherface.

Another attempt at an interesting plotline is Lila’s status as a school shooting survivor, a traumatic past that might have nuanced or strengthened the climax of the film. Vulnerable characters with dark pasts are rife in the horror genre: think Shauna Macdonald’s grieving mother/wife in The Descent (2005), whose animalistic impulses surface underground, the children in It (2017) who must all overcome their most sinister nightmares, or even Sidney Prescott in Scream (1996), who is still recovering from her mother’s death. And yet, Lila’s past offers nothing more but a quick show of her bullet wound. In Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s plot, her status becomes her whole personality, a one-dimensional cardboard cut-out stood alongside her sister Melody and friend Dante (businesswoman and businessman), Ruth (blonde), Ginny (old and weak), Richter (fixes cars and stuff), and later Sally Hardesty (played by Olwen Fouéré) who replaces Marilyn Burns in the “sole survivor” role. What’s worse is that there is nothing to be felt for these characters, not even when they are guilt-ridden, not even when they are stuck under a bed for what seems like an hour, watching Leatherface’s feet, not even when they are brutally murdered. Their terrible decisions – such as attempting to ask Leatherface to say sorry (surely Sally should know by now that this won’t be effective) – make for a never-ending gore fest that is neither entertaining nor in the slightest way scary, a string of scenes depicting people desperately trying to close car doors, people looking for keys, people being battered. Because in the end, none of the characters bear any weight in this long-winded, vapid plot: they are just people, in an abandoned Texan town, at the mercy of a geriatric Leatherface whose killing sprees should have ended fifty years ago.