![]() ![]() As his home rapidly fills up with other Gen Z entrepreneurs, Leatherface skins himself a fresh mask-this one makes him resemble the late actor Peter Boyle, if he’d been dredged out of a garbage disposal-then hauls out his trusty chain saw to take his revenge. Melody’s guilt quickly turns to terror once the woman’s adopted “son,” Leatherface (Mark Burnham), is awakened after years of peaceful dormancy. Among these opportunistic hipsters, only Melody (Sarah Yarkin) harbors any reservations about the gentrification-especially after it forces out a frail, elderly woman (Alice Krige) who’s discovered to be living in an abandoned orphanage. ![]() Texas Chainsaw Massacre follows a group of Austin-via-California “influencers” as they blow into the dying small town of Harlow, Texas (in reality, the passable look-alike of Bulgaria), angling to buy up all of its dilapidated real estate and fill it with artisanal cafes and art galleries. And to their credit, Austin-based director David Blue Garcia and first-time screenwriter Chris Thomas Devlin do seem to grasp the glorious efficiency of that formula, at least initially. Get some sexed-up young’uns, have them stumble into the Texas wilderness, then turn Leatherface loose to hunt them down. They were wild and fun, in all the ways this dour, self-important sequel simply isn’t, because it’s too busy “respecting the legacy.”įrankly, it shouldn’t be that hard to make a good Texas Chainsaw movie. But at least those movies tried new things, adding strange new wrinkles to Leatherface’s fractured psyche and giving us a chain saw–wielding Dennis Hopper slashing the hell out of some logs. Say what you will about the escalating insanity of the franchise, which has lapsed increasingly into self-parody. But without Burns, Sally’s return in Texas Chainsaw Massacre feels less like cathartic payoff than uninspired fan service, concocted solely to prove the film’s “ respect for the legacy of the first movie,” as producer Fede Alvarez put it-you know, as compared to all those other, less serious Chainsaw films. But also like those new Halloween movies-and certain other, years-later sequels to movies that have long since become cogs in the intellectual property machine-the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre is grimly serious about its lore and legacy, crushing this lean, endlessly renewable tale of a maniac man-child who carves up random teens under the tedious weight of mythos.Īnd maybe it would have, if Burns had made it. Which, fair enough: the Chainsaw timeline became convoluted to the point of incoherence ages ago woe unto anyone tasked with making sense of that whole Illuminati subplot that The Next Generation introduced, for example. It also implicitly asserts its superiority as the real next chapter in the story. Like Green’s Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre is billed as a direct sequel to Tobe Hooper’s original film, which means it ignores at least seven other Chainsaw sequels, prequels, and assorted reboots. To make an even more apt comparison, she’s like Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode in David Gordon Green’s 2018 reboot of Halloween and its sequel, having similarly devoted her life to preparing to kill the masked man who tormented her so many years ago. Trauma has hardened Sally into a survivalist, like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2. A bit of voiceover from John Larroquette, reprising his narrator role from Tobe Hooper’s original, informs us that Sally eventually overcame her mental breakdown and joined the Texas Rangers. She’s become a stony badass in a tank top, a mane of untamed white hair cascading down her back. Now played by the Irish theater star Olwen Fouéré-Sally’s original portrayer, Houston actress Marilyn Burns, died in 2014-she’s first glimpsed calmly gutting a pig with a Buck knife. By the looks of things, she’s feeling much better. Proudly defying continuity, Sally Hardesty returns for the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the confusingly titled sequel that arrives February 18 on Netflix. Sally wasn’t seen on-screen again until a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo in 1994’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, where she was just a mute shell of a woman strapped to a gurney. Subsequent Chainsaw films revealed that Sally had been institutionalized almost immediately, slipping into catatonia inside a mental hospital. The last audiences saw of Sally Hardesty, the sole survivor of 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, she was left broken and barely alive after her narrow escape from Leatherface and his family of backwoods cannibals. ![]()
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