No horror franchise has had as much difficulty figuring out where to go after its iconic original entry as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series, and David Blue Garcia’s simply titled ninth installment may well be the feeblest attempt yet to recapture the savage glory of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 masterpiece. At once a reboot, a legacy sequel, and a reimagining of its immediate predecessor, the film casually rewrites key aspects of the Leatherface mythos while simultaneously reviving some of its least essential elements.
Like the original, Texas Chainsaw Massacre opens with documentary-style narration delivered by John Larroquette. Only this time around it’s set to a true-crime program that plays on a TV in a dingy gas station convenience store where a group of delusional twentysomethings have made a pit stop on their way to Harlow, Texas, a ghost town they’ve purchased and plan to turn into a kind of millennial utopia. Hotshot chef Dante (Jacob Latimore) is leading the effort with his artist girlfriend, Ruth (Nell Hudson), and business partner, Melody (Sarah Yarkin). Melody’s sullen sister, Lila (Elsie Fisher), a survivor of a school shooting, is along for the ride.
If this all sounds like a needlessly convoluted premise for a Texas Chainsaw Massacre film, such fears are born out by a script that juggles more ideas than it cares to actually chew. Plot strands are frequently left dangling, and the film needlessly complicates matters by supplying a new backstory for Leatherface (Mark Burnham) that strangely ignores the chainsaw-toting killer’s family. Devlin recasts him as an orphan whose only semblance of kin is the matronly orphanage administrator, Mrs. Mc (Jessica Krige), with whom he’s been living quietly for nearly 50 years. When Dante and Melody kick the two out of their home, they set off a chain of events that leads to Mrs. Mc’s death and a retaliatory murderous rampage by Leatherface.
There are a few scattered moments of pure lizard-brain delight, such as a scene in which Leatherface shreds a bus full of vapid partiers. But most of the film’s set pieces are unimaginatively staged and feel arbitrary and confused. Take, for example, the climactic showdown with Leatherface, which is inexplicably set in an abandoned, rain-soaked movie theater with a huge pool of water in the middle of the floor. Shot in Bulgaria in a fake town that looks like a western movie set, the film has a chintzy, low-rent vibe that never convincingly evokes the grimy, Southern-fried milieu that permeates Hooper’s original.
Notably, the film brings back Sally Hardesty (now played by Olwen Fouéré), the lone survivor of Leatherface’s terror spree in the original film. A badass survivalist obsessed with her past trauma, the depiction of Sally is basically a mirror image of Laurie Strode from David Gordon Green’s recent series of putrid Halloween films, right down to her flowing, white locks. There’s a half-hearted attempt to parallel the anguish that Sally has experienced with Lila’s survivor’s guilt from living through a school shooting that left many of her friends dead, but the film ultimately evinces little enthusiasm for these correspondent traumas.
In the end, Garcia and co-screenwriter Chris Thomas Devlin are most interested in taking reactionary potshots at the youth of today and their supposed hypocrisy around issues like guns, the Confederate flag, and police violence. But the filmmakers have so thoroughly stacked the deck against their characters by painting them simultaneously as naïve idealists, ruthless capitalists, gun-hating liberals, and image-obsessed phonies that it’s difficult to imagine that anyone like this actually exists. Though it attempts to strike a blow against the wokerati, Texas Chainsaw Massacre ultimately does little more than hack up a bunch of strawmen.
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