Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)

A group of young Austin hipsters have great plans to commit their own version of gentrification on the near ghost town of Harrow in Texas (as we are going to call Bulgaria this week). It’s all the plan of chefs Dante (Jacob Latimore) and Melody (Sarah Yarkin), so they, Dante’s girlfriend – let’s call her Dies-too-early-for-me-to-remember-her-name – and Melody’s sister Lila (Elsie Fisher) are something of the vanguard of the project. They are visiting the town they bought apparently without ever having gone there just hours before a busload of investors is supposed to arrive. As the traumatized survivor of a school shooting, Lila has all the makings of a final girl, of course, for trauma has replaced virginity in contemporary slashers as the Sign of the Final Girl™.

Which will turn out to be useful, for a series of unfortunate events reactivates good old Leatherface (Mark Burnham), who had been living here peacefully with his mother (Alice Krige). And the years clearly have turned the guy into more of a traditional slasher, so Austin hipsters beware.

The filmmakers responsible for TCM ‘22 could have spared themselves a whole load of vitriolic criticism if only they had changed some names, filed off some elements of the script, and called this an homage to “films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”. Given that the film at hand has very little to do with text, subtext, context, style or mood of the original movie, and is rather shit seen as the direct sequel it purports to be, it really wouldn’t have lost out on anything but a marketable name. Without the TCM millstone round its back this could have happily survived as a fun, dumb, gory and pretty silly throwback slasher that superficially tacks on some modern social concerns.

It still is that, mind you, it’s just that much more difficult for many a horror fan to overlook what it purports to be, but is much too dumb to actually manage to be. Fortunately, while I believe the original TCM to be one of the greatest horror movies ever made, I have zero interest in TCM as a franchise, so it is surprisingly easy for me to treat this as the movie it actually is and just ignore the stuff that should never have been in there in the first place.

Seen as a series of dumb, bloody, and fun set pieces following established slasher formula - with some awkward borrowing from the first neo-Halloween thrown in because being derivative seems to be a bit of a way of life for this one – David Blue Garcia’s film is actually a success. There is many a fun and highly unlikely chainsaw kill, including what is certainly the best bus chainsaw massacre ever put to film (seriously, the scene is pretty incredible), excellent suspense sequences, and character writing so bad (screenplay credit goes to Chris Thomas Devlin) it does tend to be rather funny, particularly with a – perfectly decent - cast who treat this nonsense as earnestly as possible. It is all shot and edited with improbable gloss and care, suggesting Garcia could direct the hell out of a proper script, but is perfectly willing and able to put effort into whatever this thing he’s been hired for is supposed to be.

As something of a bonus, there are also quite a few moody scenes of characters wandering through the very atmospheric empty town lot, which is the sort of thing that’ll always delight me to no end in a horror movie; particularly since it means we don’t have to suffer through another warehouse and corridor walker.