Gee-zus this was bad. You should just go ahead and read the fuzzed out part of telefrog’s message. But beware! Not because of spoilers, but because it’s so insane it could make you insane, like seeing a cthulhu.
I really liked this, mostly because it steadfastly ignored all the trashy follow-ups to Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I blame all those godawful sequels for my incorrect assumption all these years that the original was trash, mostly because they make all the wrong conclusions about Tobe Hooper’s original. Namely, that the family is a cunning group of cannibals who hunts down innocent travelers. There is no textual support for this in the 1974 movie, but it’s the foundation for so many of the trashy horror movies Texas Chainsaw Massacre would spawn, and not just its own sequels.
So right away, I like that this is just about the one guy from the original, even if it’s just going to ignore the fact that the murders were also committed by the hitchhiker and gas station proprietor. (Why couldn’t the crawl have just told us they had been arrested and were rotting in prison? I presume so the protagonists don’t know about the killer, which probably wouldn’t be the case if his brother and father had been arrested.)
But I like how this preserves the idea that he’s not just some proactively murderous slasher. Instead, he reacts to misunderstandings. He lashes out when he’s confused or feeling threatened. He’s a reactively murderous slasher. And Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the 1974 version and now the 2022 version, is about a lethal misunderstanding.
Consider the latest Wrong Turn. After four or five movies wallowing in the inbred hillbilly cannibal trope that people took from Texas Chainsaw Massacre (I mean, seriously, what the fuck is wrong with people?), the latest Wrong Turn takes pains to shift sympathy to the hillbillies as a sort of deconstruction. The Wrong Turn filmmakers seem to think they’re being very clever when, through a twist, they reveal that the hillbillies are the wronged party and the snotty privileged kids maybe deserved what they got.
It’s a dumb movie, but my point is that even Wrong Turn is finally working its way back to where Texas Chainsaw Massacre began, when it was wrongly interpreted as an Us vs. Them story. Hardly surprising in light of Vietnam and the Cold War. It’s super easy to tap into fear of the Other to make a horror movie, and it used to be a part of the zeitgeist. But these days, the Them is no long Them; the Them is Us. These days, the call coming from inside the house isn’t an intruder. It’s someone who already lived there.
So right away, I love that this Texas Chainsaw Massacre is basically the tension between Austin and the rest of Texas! The progressives vs. the conservatives. The young liberal idealists vs. the world-weary gun-toting practical Texans. And the point of the movie is what happens when misunderstandings between them lead to chaos (the stuff in the beginning of the movie about invasive species is a set-up for the killer’s perspective). In this case, it’s simply a misplaced deed. A piece of paper. Everything would have been averted if not for a clerical error.
So I like that set-up a lot more than the convenient, creatively bankrupt, and simply gross concept of inbred hillbilly cannibals murdering randos, which shouldn’t even be a thing. I like, too, how the cops aren’t bad guys and even the surly, laconic, open-carrying contractor rube turns out to be a hero. I like also modern details like the self-driving electric car (vs the fossil-fueled pick-up), the reference to a school shooting, and the Confederate flag. I like that this Texas Chainsaw Massacre is taking pains to be relevant in the same way the original was relevant. That’s a lot more than I can say for any of the other sequels.
I also really like the casting. Owen Fouere’s face is fascinating to me. She looks like a lady Terence Stamp with her sharp features and even sharper blue eyes. It’s ballsy having her play Sally Hardesty, especially since she’s about as effective as she was in the original movie. But I did really enjoy her and Alice Krige in pivotal roles, even if they weren’t given a lot of screen time compared to the rest of cast. Damn shame we didn’t get Mark Burnham for anything other than his bulk.
I’m not sure Elsie Fisher is cut out for being a scream queen, but I love that the star of Eighth Grade and the “IT’S SO FLUFFY!” girl isn’t above doing genre pulp. Good for her! And I liked the other kids as well. I think part of why I resonated so strongly with the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is because those were the kids I grew up looking up to, being awed and intimidated by, longing to be one of them. I wonder if younger audience members will see this new cast that way? As contemporaries. If so, I’m delighted they’re more than the usual slasher movie fodder of the stereotypical jock, virgin, nerd, etc. Instead, they’re a group of driven entrepreneurs, hardly a stoner or slacker among them. I especially like the unlikely pair of sisters. They’re as Texas as the Coen brothers*, which is to say not all Texans are open-carrying rubes with a blind spot for the Confederate flag.
I got the sense the script was trying to steer clear of actual gentrification controversy by making it clear this is a ghost town in the middle of nowhere. It’s not like they’re buying up mom-and-pop stores to cram some arts district into a downtown block or forcing people out of low-cost housing. They’re literally revitalizing a ghost town. They’re idealists, perhaps naive and impractical, but they’re not the mustache twirling purveyors of gentrification that would make us cheer for them dying. I think that’s also why we have Elsie Fisher’s backstory about the school shooting, and her sister’s protectiveness towards her. We’re supposed to actually like these characters.
That’s also why a busload of dudebro/investor/party-hard types is imported into the movie. They’re the real chainsaw fodder and, boy, do they deliver! When they think only of social media during a crisis, we are now free to enjoy the actual massacre while still caring about the two sisters, the gun-toting mechanic, and Sally Hardesty. That bus scene was awesome. I just wish the filmmakers had the resources for something like this, which is what I think they really wanted. But I’ll take that incredibly graphic scene of the banker woman trying to escape out the window. Yow.
Also, @Telefrog, I think you or I misinterpreted some of the backstory about Sally Hardesty. The impression I got was that she had moved back to her grandparents’ house from the original movie, which is a completely different place that’s an indeterminate distance from Harlow, where this movie takes place. If you recall, Sally and Franklin spent summers at their grandparents house, which was right next door to the house where the killers lived. I think you’re confusing Harlow, the town where this movie takes place, with the rural area where the gas station and two homes from the original movie were located.
-Tom
* who, I later realized, aren’t Texan
Also, I don’t think the director understands how a chainsaw works. It’s not a lightsaber. It can’t just cut smoothly through a wood floor, thick support beams, and a metal pipe like they’re made out of paper.
My guess is the filmmakers of Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies have never cared one whit how chainsaws work. And they can take comfort knowing that most of their audience doesn’t know either!
I did enjoy that he was tearing up his own home with a chainsaw again. It reminded me of the original movie when his father berates him for chainsawing their own front door.
-Tom
Oh maybe. I could’ve sworn it was supposed to be the original Sawyer family home, but I could very well be mistaken. Still, in 50 years if Sally never grokked to the lumbering giant in the orphanage nearby, she’s basically the worst Texas Ranger ever.
Oh, definitely. There’s a lot of handwaving around how to wrap up the first movie and then fast-forward fifty years. But again, I like how this movie plays into the original movie’s narrative where “Leatherface” isn’t a killer by default. Instead, he’s like Of Mice and Men gone horribly wrong. Well, wronger. But as long as someone is minding him, nothing bad is going to happen.
I rewatched True Grit about a month ago. I love how Charles Portis, a writer from Arkansas, and the Coens, a pair of Jewish men from Texas*, use the story to make fun of Texas Rangers. Jeff Bridges has some line that’s surely from the novel about how he never met a Texas Ranger who didn’t have some story about having to drink from a mud puddle. Matt Damon is so good at playing characters who don’t know they’re insipid. :)
-Tom
* Actually, I must have dreamed this. They’re from Minneapolis. I have no idea why I thought they were from Texas.
So I went back and checked. This definitely isn’t how the movie presented the situation!
As soon as Sally Hardesty gets word about the radio call the store proprietor overheard, she jumps into her vehicle and we see her flooring the gas pedal. An exterior shot makes it clear it’s about an hour from sundown and she won’t arrive at the scene outside Harlow until after dark. So we can infer that she lives at least a couple of hours of fast driving from the orphanage in Harlow. In other words, she lived across the state from the killer and was nowhere near him.
However, the stinger after the credits shows the killer returning to his home from the original movie. So it’s still walking distance if you’ve got supernatural chainsaw killer strength.
-Tom