** SPOILERS ** Woof...what a dog. This movie should exist only as a teaching example to young screenwriters and directors on everything NOT to do when constructing a movie.
First off, why bother? This franchise was played out back in the 80s when the infamous Cannon Group tried to make a go of milking it for dollars. The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is an icon in horror cinema, and for good reason. The utter simplicity of it's story and approach, matched with a lightning-in-a-bottle performance by a cast that was literally being driven crazy by director Tobe Hooper in 120 degree Texas heat, pulsates with a gritty realism that is hard to shake. The moment you slick things up and start noodling with the plot, the whole mess is going to collapse like an over baked soufflé.
The Michael Bay reboots had a certain something about them that made them watchable--even enjoyable--but this hackneyed attempt is rotten to the core.
In the featurette, producer Carl Mazzocone confesses that his plan was to reacquire the rights and create a 6 movie franchise like Saw. If the trajectory of that arc starts this low, somewhere around #4 they won't bother to make a movie, they'll just throw you down a flight of stairs when you show up to the theater.
Mazzacone is just thinking dollars, and it shows. His reverence to the source material only goes so far as to use a ton of it in the opening credits and give Gunnar Hansen (the original Leatherface) a cameo.
The script is everything I hate about current Hollywood storytelling. All the characters fit a type and never veer from it, never speaking or behaving like normal people. Every action they perform is in service of forwarding the plot. There's nothing organic or believable about a single person in the whole film, and thus: who cares. It's all just meat being carved up. And you can pour as much blood on it as you want, it doesn't make me care, and it doesn't make me scared.
I don't know how much to blame the director for my next gripe, because I suspect this has more to do with some arrogant producer forcing his creative input into the editing: for horror to work, it needs to breathe. Horror is all about the build of tension and the release. MTV style hyper editing will kill any and all suspense instantly. This film is in such a hurry it never pauses to let the audience bask in suspense. But it will hang around for 10 minutes at a stretch while it dolls out it's convoluted plot.
Yes, and lets talk about the horrible plot. When the idea of turning Leatherface into the hero at the end and having the main girl turn out to be his long lost cousin came up in early creative meetings, someone with half a brain should have spoke up and nixed it then and there. Just bad, just horribly horribly bad, and completely miscalculated.
But then this is the creative crew team that thought having lead Alexandra Daddario blatantly running around in a belly shirt the whole movie would be sexy, not completely awkward and distracting. Or, when Daddario gives Leatherface back his chainsaw so he can dispatch the corrupt mayor of the town and says "Do your thing, Cuz" that the audience would cheer in appreciation, not nearly kick in their flat screen in frustration.
To surmise: attractive actors are wasted on hack writing, decent cinematography can't make up for a director that doesn't know how to tell a story visually, a greedy producer dreams about franchise money and skips the whole part about making a movie worth watching. Awful, terrible and a total insult to the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
