In 1974 director Tobe Hooper unleashed The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and a terrifying new cinematic villain in Leatherface, upon the world. Since then it has turned into yet another one of those horror franchises which has chucked out sequel after sequel over the years, most leaving a bad taste in the mouth. The latest, this time coming at us in 3D, sadly only adds to that pile.
The plot follows Heather (Alexandra Daddario), a young woman who one day finds out she has inherited a large estate from a grandmother she thought had died long ago. She and her friends set out on a road trip to see what has been left for her, only to discover a chainsaw-wielding maniac is part of her “inheritance.”
This spectacularly inept sequel sports some of the bark but absolutely none of the bite of the original film. Director John Luessenhop (Takers) mistakes gore for genuine and effective scares – remember the original contains virtually no blood – choosing to graphically show dismemberment and the like in a way that’s become commonplace and dull in the horror genre over the last few years.
The film wants to have its cake and eat it too as it’s both a continuation of the franchise – in fact the opening credits is a stylised run through of the entire original film before carrying on directly from where that film ended – and a sort of reboot to fit the film into today’s norm of Hollywood horror filmmaking. It fails on both accounts as it’s neither scary enough (in fact not scary at all) to be a good modern horror nor an effective tip of the hat to the original. Not only are we treated to a rehash of the original in the opening credits but the first third of the movie is spent with these stupid, clichéd, uninteresting characters who somewhat follow the path of the teens in the original. Van, old Texas back roads, mysterious big house, even the stranger they pick up along the way – it’s all in there but it’s nothing more than a pale imitation.
Gore hounds might get a kick out of the graphicness but then again there are thousand other horror movies which offer that thrill but also have a lot more to offer on top of that. You can’t just show what a chainsaw blade does to someone in all its “glory” and expect that to pass off as scary; you have to develop characters so that the audience actually cares about them and conjure a half-way decent sense of dread and apprehension. The blood-soaked horror action is just tedious, repetitive and lifeless.
The big sell this time around is the fact that it’s in 3D but it only acts as a prime example of why the format is a waste of time if it’s not used in an innovative way to enhance the story. The only reason it’s in there (apart from the obvious extra boost in ticket revenue) is so they can have gimmicky sequences of Leatherface thrusting the chainsaw out at you. But the trouble is that’s all it is, a gimmick, and the rest of the film suffers from it slavishly trying to find more ways to poke sharp objects at you.
As they awkwardly try to find a way to tie things into the original story, the film makes the mistake of trying to make us care about Leatherface. He is a lumbering killing machine and not in any way a sympathetic figure, and the film thinks it’s being clever by putting a twist on the way we look at the character and the franchise as a whole. It doesn’t work and just comes off as clutching at straws to make the franchise relevant now that we’re six sequels in.
Even die hard horror junkies or even fans of the franchise should look elsewhere as there are so many other worthwhile horror movies out there than this unimaginative, production-line and ultimately pointless sequel. All this crushingly ineffective installment does is remind you just how creepy, shocking and unnerving the original was and makes you wonder why you didn’t just spend the time watching that instead.
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