LEATHERFACE

Sigh. Someone said it was good. I swear to god, they said it was a worthy prequel to Tobe Hooper’s original Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I’m here to declare it’s not. Not by a long shot.

Here’s the rub. Texas Chain Saw Massacre isn’t a movie. It’s an emotional endurance test that just happens to exist on physical media (and digital if you can find it on one of the three-hundred streaming channels now populating our homes). To try to make a sequel, remake, prequel, sidequel or reboot of it is like trying to replicate someone hitting your childhood pet with a car, only with a refined marketing team giving their two-cents on what the words “scary” and “disturbed” mean. It’s like watching Dennis Leary do stand-up after listening to a Bill Hicks album. 

Actually, I take that back. The only one that worked was the 1986 direct sequel, and the only reason *why* it worked was because Tobe Hooper was savvy enough to fully embrace the concept’s hidden satire instead of revisiting the original’s realistic savagery.

There is no point to Leatherface. The plot revolves around some uninspired bullshit about the origins of Massacre’s most famous killer, pretending to show how a good kid can go really bad. The directors said their aim was to create a cross between Badlands and The Virgin Suicides. Either their aim is on par with my son’s with a lidless toilet, or they accidentally rented the porn versions of those films.

And a quick note for all us filmmakers out there: when you have an hour and thirty-one-minute film, putting an hour and twenty-eight minutes of droning noise labeled music does nothing to elicit suspense.