The Netflix slasher joins an unfortunate trend in horror: “legacy sequels” that fail to capture what made the classics so special.
The premise of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, even on the smaller scale of the horror genre, is fairly simple. Young people traveling through rural Texas come across a dilapidated house where a cannibal's family lives. Leatherface, a ferocious, childlike member of the clan wearing a mask made of human skin, attacks them with a chainsaw (among other weapons). So that's all. Tobe Hooper's 1974 film is as brutal today as it was decades ago due to its variegated style, which makes the viewing experience uncomfortably close to reality: sweaty and grotesque.
Of course, if a horror film succeeds in the slightest, it cannot be left alone; A sequel would eventually follow, albeit a direct-to-video schlock. If it makes the kind of unforgettable impression that the Texas Chain Saw Massacre did, the follow-up will never end. Since the release of the first film, eight more Texas Chainsaw films have appeared: three sequels that played out for diminishing returns; Then a remake that spawned its own prequel; Then a 3-D sequel to the original, which led to another prequel; And now Netflix's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the latest attempt to add to the appeal of the first film.
Spoiler alert: it doesn't succeed. Almost every cheaply made horror masterpiece that spawned an entire cinematic universe (think Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and even Saw) had a power-bottle quality that proved impossible to imitate. Those series have a lot of fun trying to build a world around a masked killer, but the detail on the villain's motives usually falters with his creepy suspense. Now, with so many decades of Texas chainsaw lore to sift through, each new entry must choose what to keep and what to forget from earlier films, rather than vying for narrative consistency.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (This Time There's No Time), directed by David Blue Garcia and written by Chris Thomas Devlin, makes a similar choice to David Gordon Green's 2018 Halloween. It's a "legacy sequel" to the original film that ignores every other version, trying to clean the slate, reboot the series, and pay homage to its precursor. While Greene's film was largely successful on all those fronts, becoming a smash hit, Garcia feels unnerving and anonymous, leaning on cross visual jerks while failing to match the brashly brutality of his Loststar.
The 1974 Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a surprisingly bloodless film. (Hilariously, Hopper expected it to get a PG rating by limiting onscreen gore; the Motion Picture Association rated it an R.) But it's relentless and intense; Why Sally Hardesty (played by Marilyn Burns) and her friends are under a violent siege by Leatherface's family is never really explained, and the lowdown of the house they look like a dank slaughterhouse is practically off screen. getting away. In contrast, Garcia's new Texas Chainsaw Massacre makes a shocking attempt to cast its victims (somewhat unintentionally) as adversaries. They are Austin transplants traveling to a small town in Texas to claim an abandoned property as part of some gentrification scheme. When they unwittingly evict the homeowner, Leatherface shows up and swirls his chainsaw to take revenge.
The extent to which Leatherface actually cares about gentrification is hard to parse. After all, he's a silent great man wearing a human-flesh mask, who has long taken a "chainsaw first, ask questions later" approach to meeting new people. But the ham-fisted explanation that her subsequent children (played by Sarah Yarkin, Elsie Fisher, Jacob Latimore, Jessica Allen, and Nell Hudson) are morally trespassing on their territory robs her of the ensuing devastation of power. Garcia is also unwilling to downplay the gore. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is full of detailed, digitally created wounds that are far more shocking and physically bizarre than anything that can be achieved through makeup. However, these impressive-looking murders bear no weight; CGI blood spurts are very artificial.
The "legacy" aspects of this sequel are also embarrassingly flat. Leatherface, played by Mark Burnham here, is believed to be a similar character to the first film, which is only decades old. The original actor, Gunnar Hansen, passed away in 2015, and this new performance adds nothing to suggest too much inner depth; Other Texas chainsaw entries took a little more effort to explain why Leatherface became such a monster. The new film also stars Sally, the lone survivor of the 1974 film; Burns died in 2014, so the role has been recast with Olwen Faure, who only appears in a few scenes and gets little to do.
The film is half-heartedly trying to copy the success of Jamie Lee Curtis' return to the new Halloween movies, but it can't do much more than this idea. Of course, the legacy of the franchise will remain largely unchanged by this latest flop; Soon, of course, there will be a few more attempts to bring Leatherface back. But each attempt only adds to the mystery of the original: as simple as its adventures may seem, they can't be replicated.