After close to 50 years of Leatherface, it is hard to distinguish one sequel from the other. I've seen the first two "Massacre" films and "The Return of the Chainsaw Massacre" and then the 2003 remake. I am not sure why I bothered since the only sequel that seems to match the feverish pace of the original shocker was "Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2," and that is only because the original director Tobe Hooper helmed it. This new film supposedly ignores all the sequels after the original. I suppose that is why it is titled "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" leaving out the "The" yet not splitting chain from saw but I digress.
A bus load of entrepreneurs have bought a ghost town in South Texas called Harlow. These are the current Generation Z'ers who think nothing of converting a town in Texas to a gentrified business marketplace full of eateries, comic books and anything you might find in a strip mall. There is Sarah Yarkin as Melody, one of two San Francisco chefs from a cooking show who drags her sister, Lila (Elsie Fisher, looking like Bud Cort's daughter), a survivor of a school shooting, to this town. There is also enthusiastic Dante (Jacob Latimore), the other chef who might have misplaced the deed to this town, and his fiancee (Nell Hudson) whom you know will be roadkill. An older woman living at an orphanage (Alice Krige) is forced out by these entrepreneurs (oh, let's not forget there is a torn Confederate flag on a pole) and she calls Dante a, well, you get the idea since he's black. Leatherface himself (Mark Burnham) is living upstairs in this building and when the old woman dies during a seizure, you know the chainsaw will be buzzing soon enough and someone's skin is needed for a face mask.
I was never bored by this new entry in the Leatherface Chronicles and some of it is gruesome fun (the bus massacre is bloody as hell and does not leave out one exposed entrail). I wanted Melody and Lila to leave this godforsaken ghost town and so that is the level of involvement I had with this movie. We also get the brief return of Sarah Hardesty (Olwen Fouéré replacing the late Marilyn Burns), the lone survivor of the original film who is ready for vengeance (apparently she's been wanting to kill Leatherface all this time and she skins pigs, though for a nanosecond I thought she was skinning a human corpse).
In the end, this just felt like a gory slasher movie rather than anything approaching the level of the first two Massacres. There is no real intensity, no feverish pitch, nothing here to remind us of that claustrophobic 1974 nightmare which is among the greatest horror films of all time. The ending mimics the original with some minor differences yet without, dare I say, balletic grace. Leatherface still knows how to use that saw and pound somebody's head into mashed potatoes. He is not perplexed by cell phones, self-driving vehicles or cancel culture - he just want things to remain as they once were like that tiny Confederate flag.
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