Too much massacring, not enough Texas
This prequel to 1974’s slasher classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre carries on the series’ legacy of terrible violence and terrible writing. The best horror movies leave the most frightening elements to an audience’s imagination. Leatherface is not one of those movies.
Whether it’s someone’s skull being split open or a rotting corpse popping up during a sex scene or someone crawling inside a maggot-ridden cow carcass and then barfing, every awful thing gets screen time in Leatherface’s origin story.
His motivations for smirching the good name of power tools aren’t all that complicated. As a child, a young Jed Sawyer was cheered on by a circle of hillbilly relations to mutilate a thief with a chainsaw to “protect the family.”
But the Sawyers take their murdering of locals one step too far when they get Jed, disguised in the hide of a cow’s head (leather + face = Leatherface), to lure the daughter of a Texan ranger to her death.
Ten years later, Jed is living under a new name at a psychiatric hospital where the doctors have been conducting experiments on the patients. During a riot, he escapes alongside three other violent patients, tossing a kidnapped nurse in the trunk for good measure.
Their ensuing road trip is a series of disgusting horrors interspersed by terrible Texan accents. Tammy (Nicole Andrews) and Ike (James Bloor, seen earlier this year as “Irate Soldier” in Dunkirk) are the group’s evil, horny psychopaths; Bud (Sam Coleman) is a lumbering giant capable of brutal violence; Lizzy (Vanessa Grasse) is the nurse taken against her will, though she remains pretty good-natured about it; and Jackson (Sam Strike) is the handsome, conflicted one who has mixed feelings about both romancing Lizzy and abducting her.
We don’t know for sure which of these deranged escapees is the former Jed/future Leatherface, but if the ambiguity is intended to add an air of mystery to the plot, it fails. But Texas Chainsaws aren’t sold on their tightly wound plots. The franchise’s specialty is in its massacres, and Leatherface has all the cheap, nasty, heartless violence you could ever want (if you want more, please seek help).
If only Leatherface leaned harder into the franchises’ Texan setting the way previous installments have. While slasher series such as Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street wring terror from sleepy suburban neighbourhoods, Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies are at their best when they strand city kids in the country and watch them squirm in a horror-heightened version of rural life, where urbanites are not welcome and everyone knows that slaughtering pigs is a transferable skill.
But Leatherface doesn’t bring any cultural perspective to its Texan setting. This is especially curious con- sidering filmmakers Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo are from France — not exactly the Texas of Europe.
Lili Taylor, so wonderful in Six Feet Under, The Conjuring and American Crime, gives a way-too-worthy performance in the thankless role of the Sawyer family matriarch, a wasted actor in a movie where the maggotridden cow corpse gets the star treatment.