Horror movie remakes and reboots and reimaginings keep popping up on the cinematic landscape like so many zombies on the horizon they just keep coming and no one can seem to kill them.
Someone should have figured out how before they made “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.No, not Tobe Hooper’s 1974 film that helped kick off the slasher craze. This is a new film from Netflix, directed by David Blue Garcia, streaming Friday. They lost the word “The” in the title somewhere along the line and the imagination and creativity everywhere else.
It’s not clear that the movie has anything to say, new or otherwise. There’s a passing nod to cancel culture that’s funny but goes nowhere, what seems like an interesting take on the “final girl” trope that’s undercut and a pretty good use of a Tesla’s self-driving capabilities.
Other than that it’s just blood and guts, and lots of it.One of the innovations of Hooper’s film was prefacing it with the idea that what took place in the film was a true story. It wasn’t — some of it was inspired by the serial killer Ed Gein — but mostly it was just made-up.
In the new film, it’s been 50 years since the events of the original. (Other sequels aren’t acknowledged.) Melody (Sarah Yarkin) and Dante (Jacob Latimore) are traveling to Harlow, Texas, to convert the ghost town into a kind of artistically minded business commune (one character dismisses it as a cult). Melody’s sister Lila (Elsie Fisher) and Dante’s girlfriend Ruth (Nell Hudson) are going with them.
As in the first film, there’s a stop at a gas station, and it’s appropriately creepy. And tacky; the place sells knickknacks like little chainsaw corkscrews. There we also learn that Sally Hardesty (Olwen Fouéré) — the lone survivor of the earlier attacks by Leatherface and his cannibal family — is still alive.
0 Comments