Well, it's just hit Netflix today and I've given it a spin - which didn't take long, as it's only 75 minutes before the credits roll (stick around for a brief scene after the credits).
It seems, by re-introducing Sally Hardesty (played by a different actress), that they're going for a Halloween 2018 thing - however, Sally is so under-used that you kind of wonder why bother?
Her story is so sketch-thin that it holds no weight and, of course, there's the usual piss poor excuse for her to not shoot Leatherface when she's got him in her sights.
The main protagonists are also intensely irritating: Gen Z hipsters with a bizarre idea to turn Harlow, a backwoods shit hole that's practically a ghost town, into some kind of cool new place for easily triggered ponces to get away from the challenges of modern life.
Indeed, the opening portion of the movie is doused with 'social relevancy' - school shootings, racism, police stops, the Dixie flag - it's too busy, and leaves the characters as little more than a series of Twitter cliches. Melody, in particular, is a pretty rancid character - a self-righteous arse who has to tear down others with pathetic insults to make herself look tough (see the gas station encounter with Richter). That's one of the film's main faults - the characters are extremely irritating. You WANT to see them killed off ASAP. So where's the tension and suspense? You're just waiting for Leatherface to do his job. You don't need socially relevant, tortured souls with deep and meaningful backstories, or crushingly nice puppy adopters, or whatever - you just need decently written normal personalities who don't annoy you or, preferably, likeable characters you care about (at least somewhat) - see Friday 13th Part 4, as an example. Dante is just annoying, Ruth barely gets any screen time (let alone characterisation), so it's really only Lila who gets any kind of arc, and she's the only one who's passable (she's not overtly annoying, and she has a past trauma to surmount).
Weirdly, though, this may be the intention of the script - to make these Gen Z hipsters actively awful so the viewer wants them dead - because, rather oddly, Leatherface becomes the righteous victim of this whole movie!
Some aspects of the movie are a fucking mess, some listed above, but the film also has some nice touches that work quite well. Certain sequences have lots of nice details (e.g. the blood oozing under the bathroom door, Leatherface emerging from the field of dead sunflowers), while there are some nicely directed scenes with a decent set up.
The bus massacre was pretty good fun - although I could have done without the cringe-as-fuck line "Do anything and you'll get cancelled, bro" - it's just indulgent and clunky. Just have them raise their phones, idiots that they are, and let the carnage begin.
Speaking of carnage - there's plenty of awesome gore and kills. So it certainly delivers on the splatter and gruesome stuff.
Leatherface works pretty well, too, even if he's rather powerful for somebody who's in their mid-60s! Chuck someone halfway across a street? No problem! Mind you, it is great to see Leatherface whip out his classic yellow chainsaw, and I particularly liked how it was used in slightly different ways - such as throwing it across the ground to try and clip someone running away. I also liked how they staged some of his key scenes, and had him take the initiative when it was offered, launching into a full charge with his chainsaw roaring.
The movie's well shot and looks the part, although its primarily limited to the town of Harlow (so there's little in the way of wide open exteriors or rural areas - it was shot in Bulgaria, which obviously ain't Texas, so I guess they were kinda limited in that regard).
In terms of the three most recent TCM movies - TCM3D, Leatherface, and now Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) - it is, over-the-piece, the best of a bad bunch. It seriously falters in some regards, but then considerably delivers in other regards. Naturally, it's not a patch on TCM (1974), or TCM2, or even the 2003 remake and its 2006 prequel, but it's a middle-of-the-pack runner.
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Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [click for more]
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Originally Posted by Neil
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