Yeah, I know. It’s gotten terrible reviews, but almost all of them have been written by Horror Nerds who know the whole canon of these slasher flicks that started with the original classic from 1974. My God it was scary, but it’s also a faint memory on my aged mind. Heck, even the 2003 reboot scared me and I can’t remember anything about it, either.
Except that I got to interview Jessica Biel for it. That I remember.
But ignorance is bliss for me, or so my wife always tells me – I don’t know anything about all of the sequels and reboots and all that. I only know that the new TCM sequel in front of me is well done and has, being honest, excellent gore and special effects. Buckets of blood? Yes, but also inventive ways of extracting it.
In this one, it’s present day and a group of yuppies have bought an abandoned old town with plans to completely develop and make it some kind of destination hang out…or something like that.
One of them spots a tattered Confederate flag hanging from a second story window. That won’t do! But when he and a friend enter what they assumed was an abandoned building they are confronted buy a spooky old lady with a spooky old face who insists that the property is still hers.
The old lady goes into some kind of convulsion and must be rushed to the hospital by ambulance. And guess who’s going to accompany her? Yep, her son, the one and only Leatherface! Just doing the math here – ole Leather would have to be pretty old at this point, if this is truly a sequel to the 1974 original. But, by golly, these beautiful young people aren’t going to kill themselves, right?
And so our lumbering butcher, having been figuratively awakened from his slumber, and by people who have ostensibly harmed his Mama, gets busy killing.
I’m not going to itemize the individual kills, but they are plentiful and extremely graphic. Is the movie scary? Well, no – certainly not compared to the first. But it does ratchet up the tension with a game cast and, as I said, really well done slasher effects. The bus sequence is top of the craft. You’ll see.
The whole “family of cannibals in a creepy house on the Texas prairie” is gone, and I know that has hurt a lot of critics’ feelings. Get over it, bro. Just take this for what it is. It’s a tight 80 minutes or so. I thought it was a great example of what it is – even if it’s a terrible example of what it wasn’t trying to be.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre | Extremely Graphic | Now on Netflix | 3 out of 4 Stars
