Netflix’s ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’: Film Review

As every horror movie fan knows all too well, you can’t keep a good villain down. The new sequel to Tobe Hooper’s 1974 horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre follows the path of the similarly rebooted Halloween by essentially ignoring the other films in the long-running series (there have been eight, for those who weren’t counting, including a not-well-received 2003 remake) and going back to the original.

At times, this effort premiering on Netflix too closely follows the path of Halloween, by featuring as a major plot element the return of an emotionally scarred female survivor who bears more than a passing resemblance to Laurie Strode. Nonetheless, slasher film fans should embrace this Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which pays loving homage to the original via a variety of Easter Eggs and doesn’t at all stint on the gore. Seriously, there’s so much blood splattered on the screen that you’ll have an urge to wear a poncho if you sit too close.

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After a nostalgia-panging introduction featuring narration by John Larroquette, who performed similar chores in the original and remake, we’re introduced to a quartet of young people who might as well have targets on their backs: Melody (Sarah Yarkin), her teenage sister Lila (Elsie Fisher, graduating from Eighth Grade), and their friends Dante (Jacob Latimore) and Ruth (Neil Hudson). The city slickers arrive in a small Texas town — so desolate that it makes the one in The Last Picture Show seem like a budding metropolis — where Melody and Dante inexplicably hope to start a business.

Unfortunately, their recently acquired building is the site of an abandoned orphanage, with a tattered Confederate flag waving outside. Upon entering, they encounter an elderly woman (Alice Krige, whose horror movie credentials stretch all the way back to 1981’s Ghost Story), who offers them sweet tea. Soon, a hulking figure (Mark Burnham, ably filling the extremely large shoes of his late predecessor in the role, Gunnar Hansen) fleetingly appears at the top of the stairs. “He’s the last of my boys,” the old woman explains.

Yes, and it’s also you-know-who, now much older but no less prone to homicidal range. Which soon becomes evident when the old woman suffers a stroke and dies in a police van on the way to the hospital. Leatherface quickly dispatches two policeman and one of the newcomers who had gone along for the ride, and resumes his former grooming habit by slicing the skin off his mother’s face to use as a mask.

It’s the first of many bloodbaths as Leatherface, retrieving his favorite chainsaw, goes after everyone who crosses his path. The body count quickly rises, the highlight being a massacre in a partygoer-filled bus in which director David Blue Garcia (Tejano) truly lets his freak flag fly. The vividly rendered decapitations and eviscerations come across like the slasher-movie equivalent of an orgy.

Fans of the original film will welcome the reappearance of the sole survivor of Leatherface’s initial killing spree, Sally Hardesty, grippingly played by veteran Irish actress Olwen Fouere (Marilyn Burns, the original Sally, died in 2014). Sally, who frequently gazes at a faded Polaroid photo of her murdered friends, clearly hasn’t let bygones be bygones. Seeking revenge after nearly half a century, she grabs a shotgun and heads off in pursuit of her former tormentor, who, when they finally reunite, has the gall to not even recognize her.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre doesn’t exactly offer anything new (2013’s Texas Chainsaw 3D, a previous attempt at a sequel to the original, at least featured more than one dimension), but gorehound fans who rejoice at watching people’s innards fall out of their bodies will find much to appreciate. They may, however, be disappointed by the fact that Leatherface meets a gruesome fate at the film’s end, meaning that he will never, ever return.

(Spoiler alert). Just kidding, he’s all right!