Rating: 🤮

I am so tired of this, whatever “this” is. Maybe it's the future, maybe it's trauma, maybe it's capitalism, maybe it's just gas bubbles escaping from our collective consciousness. Whatever “it” may be, it is taking an undeniable tax on the very fabric of our existence, in an uncontrolled manner which has eroded fundamental tenets of our cognition and by large, our society. It’s an ideological poison which has seeped into every facet of our waking lives, not least of which is the swamp of mainstream media production. You may argue against this notion, but I can offer no other explanation for such insipid and exhausting social war clunkers as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a 73-minute reactionary Twitter clapback in which Leatherface literally kills cancel culture.

Released with absolutely no fanfare to the Great Netflix Garbage Patch, 2022’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of cinema’s wondrous quantum nadirs, serving as the simultaneous career low-point for every single person involved. Some, like composer Colin Stetson, will escape unharmed. Others, like writer Fede Álvarez, find their careers terminating in a film which will be unfavorably compared to Halloween Kills; one of the worst insults I can conceive. Àlvarez in particular should be put on some sort of watchlist - whatever potential followed him through 2013’s Evil Dead, whatever goodwill survived the turkey baster assault of Don’t Breathe, dies quietly with a script so lazy I'm convinced it wasn't written at all, but rather autogenerated by plugging three years of trending buzzwords into David Gordon Green’s Halloween, like horror cinema's most embarrassing Mad Lib. Not to be confused with the mad libs, who populate this story and die owned like it's a full-time job.

Taking the form of that most despicable invention, the legacy sequel, Texas Chainsaw brings Leatherface into our roaring ‘20s with the grace of an autopilot Tesla crash; all poor construction and bad handling and the pervasive sense that if this is the future then maybe we never should've left the primordial goop. Our story follows five (or is it four or six?) well-to-do influencer types from Austin (of course), who are never properly named (if they are I've forgotten), but are buying (renting?) a small Texas town for the purpose of starting…...an arts community? A cult? Fyre Festival II? I have no idea, but whatever they're doing they're selling property to other influencer types, so there's an excuse to get a bunch of dead meat zoomers in a single place. These gun-hating, Black Lives-loving lefties run into the business end of an eponymous power tool, and eventually 1974 final girl Sally Hardesty shows up for a less memorable appearance than Jamie Lee’s fright-wigged turn in Halloween Kills. The movie then concludes by replicating Sally’s original truck-bed escape sequence with the sunroof of a self-driving car, and I got so angry I had to take a walk.

Such limp-wristed and exhausting gestures at hot-button subjects come to define Texas Chainsaw, which clumsily provides a new and humiliating take every five minutes or so. One of the first scenes is an excruciating takedown of a man open-carrying a pistol, with our girlboss deuteragonist over-emoting and suggesting he must be compensating. Later we endure our protagonist scrolling a social feed of protest photos and anti-gun ads, as well as a half-baked and shameful “black youth talks to police” encounter, some bullshit about a Confederate flag, quips about “late-stage capitalism,” and more and more and more. The second worst of these moments is when Leatherface storms onto a party bus and all the zoomers get their phones to livestream and “cancel” him (a word actually spoken in this scene) - but uh oh! They're too on their damn phones to run away! The first worst of these is when our protagonist is revealed to hate guns because she survived a school shooting, a moment so insane and infuriating I would've stormed out of the theater had I not been watching the film in my own home.

Of course, these are criticisms which I'm sure the “minds” behind The Texas Chainsaw Massacre would dismiss as the hurt feelings of a sensitive snowflake, so let me address the other reasons why this movie is an irredeemable pile of dogshit. It fails tremendously as a horror piece, presenting nothing remotely scary or tense beyond the fear of whether a character will joke that they identify as an attack helicopter. It's bunk even by the low standards of legacy sequels, offering no tangible fanservice or nostalgia aside from replicated shots and a recast Sally, who apes Laurie Strode’s “I'm destined to fight this dude” bit for no reason whatsoever. It also flops as the lead-in to a new franchise, with zero narrative intrigue or continuing threads beyond a truly asinine post-credits sequence. Even Leatherface himself is lame as hell, having been stripped of his off-kilter personality and reduced to emotionless meat with a stupid mask and a chainsaw. I have precious little good to say about the film - in my eyes, it skips right over “dire” and jumps directly to “worst of 2022” territory.

I can conjure only two bright points from Texas Chainsaw’s suffocating murk: the violence is generally nasty (in one case hilarious), and Colin Stetson’s soundtrack isn't bad. Though snoozingly generic in places, the guitar drones and metal scrapings and sublimated pig squeals give a nice Johann Johannsson/Lustmord-lite vibe for background dark ambience. I will admit I was often so red steaming mad through the film that I didn't register the music until I listened to it separately, but it’s still better than the movie deserves. Whatever positive notes I can muster are all inconsequential to an experience so poorly-written and flaccidly constructed that it makes me humiliated to call myself a horror fan, much less a Chainsaw Massacre fan. The amount of times I glanced towards the top of my desk, looking at my big-titty anime Leatherface figurine for strength during this movie, are incalculable. Should this embarrassment to the Wal-Mart bargain bin ever garner a sequel, I think it might kill me in real life.

To call The Texas Chainsaw Massacre moronic is an insult to morons the world over; to call it ill-conceived is to suggest anyone involved with the film ever conceived of anything at all. There is nothing to indicate this endeavor was anything other than an amoeba-brained, knee-jerk reaction to the recent Halloween trilogy’s success; produced and released as fast as possible to snag some of those bloody Michael dollars. It stumbles in every conceivable avenue, serving no purpose other than to lamely inflame the culture war and provide potshot SJW laughs to the couchlocked brainscum who revere South Park’s brand of apathetic “both sides”-ing as not only comedy, but a philosophy of life. The movie is mindless, insulting, exhausting, and perhaps actively regressive to the horror genre as a whole. I got my septum pierced a few hours before watching Texas Chainsaw, and I'll leave you to guess which was the worst pain I endured that day.

THE TEXAS TWITTER CLAPBACK