Texas Chainsaw Massacre - The End...for Now

This is pretty fucking stupid, but I actually had fun with it. It’s nice and brutal, and it’s so fucking short. But the best part is there is very little backstory and almost no attempt to expand on the lore of the family. It’s just Leatherface killing a bunch of people. It is not a good movie, but there’s nothing else this franchise should or could be at this point, so just make it like Friday the 13th and be done with it.

This is the one that started it all for this series of articles. I had not watched a Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie in years (I think), and then this just suddenly appeared on Netflix. For whatever reason, this was just what I needed to spark my interest in the franchise, so much so that I decided to rewatch every film and write an article for each film followed by a definitive ranking. Looking back, I wish I had just settled on ranking the movies and writing a short blurb about each, but once I started, I felt required to finish. 

Of course, I procrastinated to the point that by the time I got to this film’s article, I needed to rewatch it to remember why I liked it so much. As a standalone horror film, I found it enjoyable, if dumb, enough. But watching all of the other films, especially the most recent shitshows, made me appreciate the gory simplicity of the film. 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise got bogged down in building the lore of Leatherface and his fucked up family in the previous three films (easily my least favorite three movies in the nine-movie series). Texas Chainsaw Massacre actually does the same thing Texas Chainsaw did, in that it ignored every sequel and prequel and was actually a direct sequel to the first film. But Texas Chainsaw attempted to turn the cannibal family into sympathetic victims, with Leatherface being used by his long lost cousin as her personal murderer by the end. It was stupid and insulting.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre has no interest in building the mythology of the fucked up family. Instead, they go the Halloween (2018) route. Shit happened a long time ago, but the legend of that terrible time has grown while the monster has lain dormant; oh shit, the monster is back! They even brought back the lone survivor from the first film (played by Olwen Fouere taking over the role from the deceased Marilyn Burns) a la Laurie Strode from Halloween. She ends up being about as useful as Dick Hallorann in The Shining, but whatever. The point is Leatherface shows up and people die horribly. 

That’s all I want from this exhausting series. I don’t care about expanding the lore of the family, and I damn sure don’t want them turned into victims. They were fucked up, and they did fucked up shit. A woman running an orphanage took pity on Leatherface and took him in…and kept his chainsaw in a wall…

Okay, this movie is pretty fucking stupid, too. The whole premise of the movie is a group of influencers decide to buy almost the entire downtown area of the town close to the first film’s events. The idea that you can just make a few TikTok videos and convince dozens of people to buy up property in a ghost town in the middle of nowhere is idiotic. If there were enough people around to sustain a thriving downtown, it would already be thriving. Just sinking money into an old building won’t create a population of people with money to spend. Those people already live in places like the one they’re trying to create. (The opening narration tries to fix this by claiming the town is “just a few miles outside of Austin” but I call bullshit. If it’s so close to Austin, where all these dickheads are presumably from, then why is the drive so far that they have to charter a bus to bring people there? And why is a town so close to Austin so fucking dead?)

It’s a flimsy plot, but the whole point of it is to make fun of these influencers as they get cut to pieces in a party bus, and I’m okay with it. Perhaps the filmmakers thought they were making a statement about this generation, especially when they start livestreaming their own murders (with people commenting that it all looks fake), if so it was drowned out by the sound of a chainsaw disemboweling someone. 

There’s also the subplot of the main character being a mass shooting survivor that doesn’t get any kind of meaningful resolution, aside from her going on the attack? Or embracing assault rifles? I suppose the point was she got past her PTSD, but it’s not she’s not going to be fucked up for life after surviving the events of this movie. So the point is there are worse things to survive than a school shooting? This is just too sensitive a topic to bring into a goofy chainsaw gorefest movie. Don’t give me Leatherface killing a bunch of  morons in an Insta Story, and then ask me to ruminate on mass shootings. Pick a lane.

Beyond that, I can imagine some people not being thrilled with Leatherface’s treatment in this film. He should be in his late 60s at best, but possibly in his 70s at this point. For an AARP member, he’s a bit too deadly, but whatever. The end truly crosses a line for the character as he straight up becomes a monster akin to Jason or Freddy in that he should be dead or at the very least severely injured, but he comes back and is able to decapitate someone and do his trademark crazy chainsaw dance. I don’t care, at this point, but any purists will have issues with this. 

The original film is not a slasher film. It’s not meant to be a franchise, despite Leatherface making for an iconic horror character. There was nothing supernatural about the fucked up family, including Leatherface, in the original film. Sure, his strength became amplified in subsequent movies, but he wasn’t blatantly supernatural. Here, there has to be something beyond reality happening for him to still be alive at the end. Once again, I don’t care because this series has become an exhaustive mess, but this is not in keeping with the original at all.

And that’s why I actually like it more than most of the other films in the series. There’s no point in trying to make a film like the original. So fuck it, turn Leatherface into Jason, and let him loose on a bunch of fuckheads. There’s a Friday the 13th void in my life right now, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre filled it. If the Friday the 13th series was still active, perhaps I would have hated this silly movie. But it isn’t, so I don’t. Watching this whole motherfucking franchise has taught me that it’s pointless to get up in arms about these movies. Texas Chainsaw broke me, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre put me back together.

But I still hope this is the end of the franchise, despite the after credits scene of Leatherface returning to the house. I know there will be more because this series seems as unkillable as Leatherface himself, even if the last two movies were released direct to streaming (ish, since 2017’s Leatherface was technically released directly to…uh…DirecTV). Hopefully the tepid critical response at least leaves the series dormant for a while, because I certainly want to be done with the franchise for the time being.

Leatherface - I Don't Care About These Movies at All Anymore

I had no clue this movie existed until I decided to write about the entire series. I really didn’t want to watch it, especially when I found out it was a prequel about a teenage Leatherface. So I’m not going to be fair to this movie. It’s actually okay, but I didn’t want it. It’s somehow worse than the prequel to the remake to me for no other reason than that I’m tired of the series. But I said I’d write about all these fucking movies, so here goes.

This film is a prequel to the original and also Texas Chainsaw. You’d think this would mean I would be interested in it because Texas Chainsaw left me with so many questions about the dead, rich aunt, who is played by Lily Tomlin in this one. But this movie just made that film even dumber. It’s revealed that the aunt is basically the leader of the family, encouraging the killing they do. 

This is stupid to me because if she was gung-ho about all the killing, then why did she just gather up Leatherface and keep him locked up in her basement later on? If she’s this stone cold killer matriarch, wouldn’t she immediately seek revenge? Instead, she lives a quiet life in her mansion, waiting for her long lost niece to take over once she dies. It’s fucking stupid and is not in keeping with the character presented here. Because this family is not the type for long-term plans. They just kill whenever they fucking feel like it, and get away with it for a while somehow.

Putting that aspect of the film aside and just forgetting about Texas Chainsaw (which is for the best), Leatherface then becomes the origin of the titular character. Rather than being genetically inclined to murder like Alexandra Daddario in the last movie (I can’t forget that fucking movie!), this Leatherface has to be fucked up into becoming a maimed killer. 

Leatherface is presented as a kid who just seems to attract murder. He’s born into a murderous family, so there’s that. He’s taken away and sent to a mental institute for troubled kids. When he’s a teenager, a murderous riot takes place, and he’s taken hostage by a dumbass Bonnie and Clyde type from the institution. They go on the road, killing everywhere they go. This kid is a fucking magnet for murder!

None of this was interesting to me, or to the writers, it seems, because they used a time jump to create a needless mystery to the film. Leatherface gets taken away when he’s very little, and then the movie jumps ten years to the institution, where all the kids have different names (so parents can’t track them down, for some reason?). Because of this, we technically don’t know which of the kids on the run is the future Leatherface. This whodunit aspect just annoyed me. Not only did I not need to know why Leatherface became a killer, but I definitely didn’t need a lame ass guessing game to go along with it. By the time the real Leatherface was revealed, I just wanted the movie to end.

Obviously, I was not in the right mindset for this film. But I wasn’t alone in my disinterest in the franchise. This movie was released on DirecTv exclusively in 2017 after being shelved by Lionsgate for a year. Lionsgate had originally bought the rights to the series with a potential six films planned, but due to delays with the previous film and this film, they only made two. And they dumped this onto DirecTv, which I didn’t even realize was a thing studios did. It was like releasing a movie straight to streaming before it was really a thing. In that way, this movie is a trailblazer. But what it really means is that people were sick of this franchise, or at least sick of the direction it was going. That was certainly the case for me.

Texas Chainsaw - "Do Your Thing, Coz."

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning was a turning point in the franchise for me in that it felt pointless, providing answers to questions I didn’t ask. It didn’t make me angry, it just bored me, and, at the time, represented the nadir of the series in terms of honest interest. Texas Chainsaw, on the other hand, made me start to hate this fucking franchise.

Texas Chainsaw is one of the first movies in a “classic” franchise to do the direct sequel, ignore every other movie thing that each franchise (including this one again in 2022) seems to be doing these days. And just like those other franchises, like Halloween, they seemed to be doing it because they’ve exhausted all other ways to keep this franchise going. In other words, the filmmakers had to come up with something new.

So they decided to make the cannibal family from the original (revealed to be the Sawyer family in subsequent films [get it, “SAWyer”? Fucking brilliant]) victims rather than villains. That’s right, that fucked up nightmare family from the original film deserves your sympathy. Let me explain (if you’ve already seen it, skip the next paragraph).

The beginning of Texas Chainsaw shows clips from the original film followed by what happened directly afterward. The police show up, as do other Sawyer family members. During a standoff, a group of local vigilantes show up, eager to finally have a good excuse to get rid of the Sawyer family. The vigilantes, of course, open fire killing nearly every family member, except for Leatherface, a baby, and an unseen woman who takes in Leatherface, hiding him from the town. I have severe problems with this for multiple reasons.

First and foremost, the Sawyer family are not victims. Do they deserve vigilante justice rather than law and order justice? Yes. Yes, they fucking do! This family had to go. In the words of the old wizard from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “Look at the bones!” Sure, all the convenient extra Sawyers who magically appeared out of nowhere technically didn’t do anything that occurred in the first film, but it’s safe to assume they knew what was happening in that house. 

The logistics of the entire situation bother me, too. So the entire town knew about this fucked up family, but it took one girl finally getting away to spur them to action? Why wait for this if they knew what was going on? And where did all these extra Sawyer family members come from? And then there’s the main character’s aunt.

So Leatherface is taken in by an aunt who lives in a mansion. She hides Leatherface away in the basement, letting him do his fucked up hobbies. Where was she in the first film? Was she okay with all the cannibal shit? Was her husband (whose family is where the money comes from) aware of all this, too? And then there’s this stupid Sawyer family necklace. Daddario has it burned onto her from her dying mother, and she sees pictures of her dead aunt wearing it along with other Sawyer women. So they had a family symbol and got together for photo opportunities and shit? The family from the original film? The family that had a half-dead grandpa hanging out around, waiting to be helped to execute people? The family with the house with all the human bone art? The family that seemed to be exclusively employed by the local meat-packing facility that recently closed? They had a rich benefactor living her best life the whole time? 

Okay, okay. What the fuck ever. There was a rich aunt who lived. Fine. As she nears death, she realizes she needs a family member to take care of Leatherface, which is why she has her lawyer reach out to Daddario upon her death and let her know that she has inherited the house and all of its contents. Conveniently, everything Daddario needs to know about the fucked up situation is in a letter that she ignores until the very end of the movie, but whatever. What the fuck ever. 

Anyway, Daddario eventually learns about the whole family history through a conveniently placed box of evidence, and she embraces her Sawyer family roots, using Leatherface as her personal murderer in the end. This is after she witnessed Leatherface murder ALL of her friends, but whatever. What the fuck ever. The movie posits that she is genetically inclined to all of this.

Daddario works in the meat department of a grocery store (you know, typical job for a young woman that looks like Alexandra Daddario), and she uses her job as a way of collecting bones to use in her artwork at home. So she’s just like Leatherface. It’s just in her blood to work with meat, make shit out of fucking bones, and eventually be cool with murder. 

It’s all very stupid, but the murdering of her friends gets me the most. She personally witnessed Leatherface cut one of her friends in half. And by the end of the movie, she’s calling him fuckin' “Coz.” Look, I’m cool with my cousins, but if any of them cut one of my best friends in half with a chainsaw, then that’s crossing a line, family or not. 

I know these franchises aren’t meant to be taken seriously, especially when you get to the seventh movie. And I even like the whole direct sequel idea to clean up all the sequel and remake mess and start fresh. But turning the Sawyers into victims and making it some kind of genetic trait to butcher things and play with bones is just too stupid for me.

Of course, all of this could be forgiven if this movie was a good time. But I just didn’t like or hate these characters enough to get any kind of reaction to their deaths, except for one comic death, but that one was an anomaly. Maybe if Daddario was commanding Leatherface to kill people for a longer portion of the movie, it could have been fun, but probably not. The horror aspects of the movie were just too bland to overshadow the stupidity. 

Texas Chainsaw is obviously my least favorite movie in the franchise thus far. At this point, there are more films I dislike than like in the series, but this was the first one to piss me off with its stupidity. If there’s a silver lining to that, it’s that this is one of the most memorable films in the series for me, simply because it elicited such a strong negative reaction, and sometimes that’s better than no reaction.

Random Thoughts

I had to stop my ranting at some point in the main article, but there is one plot element I still need to address. It is revealed that Daddario’s boyfriend is cheating on her with her best friend. In fact, they start banging in a barn on the property when they come across Leatherface. Both of them die before Daddario finds out about the affair. But when she comes across the two of them as they all try to escape Leatherface, her boyfriend and friend are half naked. If a madman was chasing me with a chainsaw, I would undoubtedly be distracted. But if I came across my wife and my best friend half naked together while I was fleeing the madman, I’m pretty sure I would still have the wherewithal to ask, “What the fuck were you two doing?!” 

This isn’t just a random element of the plot; it’s a missed opportunity that could have helped explain Daddario’s murderous side at the end of the movie. Just have her discover the affair, and while she’s at her angriest with both of them, Leatherface shows up, and she lets them die rather than intervening. Her discovery of their betrayal coupled with her learning of the town’s treatment of her family (no matter how justified), could conceivably lead her to a psychotic break that allows her to accept that she has a cannibalistic chainsaw-wielding cousin instead of her just being okay with it for no reason other than finding out she was illegally adopted.

“Do your thing, coz.” In a colossally stupid movie, that line stands out far and above as the dumbest.

The recap of the original at the beginning is ruined with modern “scary” music and jump scare sounds. But at least it lets the audience know from the get-go that the filmmakers completely missed what made the original film great. “Just wanted to let you all know from the start that we are going to royally fuck this up.”

The timeline here is ridiculous. Daddario should be 40. Leatherface is in his 60s. Just change the present date to the 90s.

Although setting it in the 90s would make my favorite moment in the film impossible due to lack of smartphones. Okay, fuck a realistic timeline, I guess.

If only she had immediately read the letter she was told to read five times…

The IMDb "goofs" page is pretty great since a lot of it is just pointing out all the stupid plot elements instead of typical movie mistakes. For instance, the main characters are called out for leaving the newly inherited mansion in the hands of the cartoonishly hokey drifter they just met.

Hats off for the gruesomeness of that cut-in-half kill. Fucking disgusting. Although this might only be in the unrated cut. I watched both (why do I do things like this? I've never seen so many classic movies, yet I've seen this three times now), but can't remember if that moment is in each cut. 

Texas Chainsaw, starring Alexandra Daddario…'s midriff.

The deputy even gives her a new shirt later, but she leaves the bottom buttons undone so her midriff is still exposed.

Then that shirt gets ripped open (the movie makes it seem like it was done so Leatherface can see her scar, but the scar would be visible without ripping the shirt open). Daddario must have had an "everything but the nipple" clause in her contract, and the filmmakers pushed it to the limit.

My favorite moment is when that cop kills the freezer girl, and the mayor immediately says, "It's okay! It's okay! Didn't happen!" If there were a dozen more goofy ass moments like that, I could get behind this movie.

Leatherface is described as having "the emotions of an eight-year-old." You know how all eight-year-olds go through a chainsaw/cannibal/skin mask phase.

"He killed all my friends, but I just found out I'm a Sawyer, and he's family, so I guess I'm cool with that now."

The sheriff lets Leatherface kill a man, then lets him go?! I get that the vigilante shit at the beginning was wrong, but does that make cannibalism right? I don't care how badly a family has been fucked over by the locals; if they're constantly luring people to their home to kill and eat them, then they have to fucking go.

She reads the fucking letter at the very end, after she learned everything in it the hard way, and at the expense of her friends' lives. Goddamn! When someone tells you multiple times to read a letter, read the fucking letter!

Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III - "I Like Liver! And Onions! And Pain!"

Okay, covering this entire franchise one film at a time almost immediately became a mistake. The second one was interesting, but I’m already getting into the ones people don’t even remember existing, yet still have some kind of bullshit, undeserved “cult status.” I know that I can just drop this plan because it’s not like I have any kind of following to hold me accountable to stupid shit like this, but when I claim I’m going to do something, I typically try to follow through, even if I’m the only one who demands it. So with that, here’s Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III.

This one is pretty forgettable, mainly because they decided to mostly abandon the comedic tone of the second film and go for a more straightforward horror movie. The plot is pretty basic: a young couple comes across some weirdo at a gas station, and they end up at the Sawyer house fighting for their lives. That’s fine, but only if there’s at least some great gore or something. But the studio was so adamant about getting an R-rating that the gore is so toned down that the film only offers the empty promise of something truly disturbing. 

That’s the problem with all the sequels and remakes and prequels of this series. It is impossible to recapture the tone and surprise of the first film, so each subsequent film sets out to do something slightly different, but never as good. At least the second film said, “Fuck it, let’s make a comedy.” That film leaned all the way into it, and that’s what makes it memorable. These other films, either due to studio interference or bad filmmaking or both, don’t go all in and just end up in some weird, boring direction. 

Franchises with villains like Freddy, Jason, and Michael Myers are successful because they (mostly) stick to a basic formula, for better or worse. With Massacre, no one knows what to do with Leatherface. It’s a great name and a striking look, but is he a sadistic cannibal with the mind of a child, or is he a superhuman monster that can’t be killed? Too often, like with this film, they try to make him like Jason and the others. But why do that when Leatherface is the only one of the group that doesn’t work alone?

Texas Chainsaw isn’t a series that has to copy the slasher genre. I like watching some of these movies because they can be different. If I want Jason, I’ll watch Jason. The original Leatherface was fucked up enough already to be scary; I don’t need him to to rip cars apart and come back from the dead. I just want him to be part of a fucked up family.

You do get the fucked up family here. The only returning member is Leatherface, making this the first movie to start expanding on the Sawyer family. It’s nice to have a rotating roster of fucked-up weirdos and all, but as the series goes on, it gets less and less plausible that all these other crazies were just hanging out somewhere else during the events of the previous movies, just waiting for their turn to swoop in and take Leatherface to their murder-house.

The crazy family dynamic of the original is here again, but it’s just not disturbing this time around. You can’t recreate that kind of magic, I guess. It’s fun to see a young Viggo Mortensen as part of it, I suppose, but he’s not going all in like Bill Moseley before him or McConaughey after him. The addition of a sweet little girl felt like a weak attempt to be edgy. I didn’t care about anyone, and I didn’t find any of them particularly memorable.

In fact, I was ready to dismiss this one with a one paragraph review just to be done with it, but then I watched the special features (yes, I bought the fucking DVD just so I could write about this one). The silver lining of a lot of these failed franchise sequels is that they develop enough of a misguided cult following to warrant plenty of special features on a DVD. And since so much time has passed, everyone involved is much more honest than usual in these behind the scenes featurettes. 

With Leatherface’s DVD, director Jeff Burr is very open, even talking about being fired from the production and hired back within days when the studio couldn’t get anyone else to take on the movie. He also talks about how the studio limited him at every turn because of the desire for an R-rating (to the point that even the “unrated” cut is surprisingly tame). The most interesting revelation has to be that the ending of the film was written and filmed without Burr’s knowledge. He only learned of the ridiculous ending (in which Ken Foree is revealed to be alive with barely a scratch even though he had been clearly killed by Leatherface, and Leatherface is alive as well even though he was clearly killed, too) at the premiere. Apparently the studio found out Foree was testing well, so they wanted him alive for future sequels, which is also why they revived Leatherface. Though why they suddenly cared about continuity is beyond me.

Behind the scenes stories like that are much more interesting than what ended up on screen. I like this series overall, but the haphazard nature of each sequel makes it difficult for any of them to stand out. Leatherface at least stands out on DVD because all involved are willing to acknowledge it was a failure. And it’s interesting to hear what they intended compared to what we got to see. I might be grasping at straws to find enjoyment out of this one, but as the series goes on, that becomes harder and harder. 

Random Thoughts

The opening narration references a trial. I really wish they showed footage from the courtroom.

“He’s a little touched. Been that way since he lost his job at the slaughterhouse.” I like how losing a job at a fucking slaughterhouse is used as the excuse for this family in multiple films.

This is definitely leaning back into the horror after the comedic second movie.

“It’s Armageddon, bitch-face!”

Leatherface rips off the trunk of a car with his bare hands. This is definitely the beginning of turning him into a superhuman monster like Jason rather than a child-like murdering basket case. I’m glad the fourth movie went the complete other way with it. We have enough giant boogeymen in the horror world; why can’t we let Leatherface be the weirdo of the group? I’ll take him screeching in a wig over him ripping cars apart with his bare hands any day.

“Militant lumberjacks…see ‘em all the time.”

So Ken Foree gets run over because he runs out of bullets? Even if he had gotten a shot off, he still would’ve been run over. He lives, but it’s still stupid.

“I like liver. And onions. And pain!”

Michelle couldn’t bring herself to kill the armadillo with the rock at the beginning of the film. But she’s able to hit Leatherface with a rock at the end of the movie. Character development!

Ken Foree being alive and pretty much unscatched at the end is fucking hilarious. While it was explicitly shown, he was pressed up against a running chainsaw for quite some time, and he stopped screaming at one point. Did he just get used to the pain? Was he playing dead while being attacked with a chainsaw? He must have some zen-like pain control.