Starring Sarah Yarkin, Elsie Fisher, Mark Burnham, Moe Dunford, Jacob Latimore, Olwen Fouere, Nell Hudson, Alice Krige, and Jessica Allain.
Written by Chris Thomas Devlin, Fede Alvarez & Rodo Sayagues.
Directed by David Blue Garcia.
★★
Well, I guess it's about as good as any other TCM sequel. Which isn't saying much. I've see almost all of them. The only one I haven't seen is the one with Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger.
The original had that creepy surprise, not just of Leatherface, but there was this whole family of messed-up psychos. This outing is claiming to be a sequel to the original while ignoring all the other ones, like Halloween did a few years ago. It tries so hard to copy the Halloween model that they give Sally, surivvor of the original, the same long white hair Jamie Lee Curtis sports. But it also misses on being an actual sequel. In this one, Leatherface was in an orphanage. Huh?
This one centers on four idyllic college students who are seeking to resurrect a ghost town in rural Texas and turn it into some sort of utopian commune. Naturally the locals lay their accents on thick so that these city-slickers know their kind ain't welcome here. The trouble begins when they dfind that one resident, the old owner of the orphanage, has not vacated, and she has a silent giant who stands in dark shadows in the background. When the old woman dies, the giant loses it. He removes someone's face and wears it as his own, then goes to find his long-hidden chainsaw.
The gore is as extreme as gorehounds could hope for. There's one scene on a bus where passengers are sliced in every way one could be with a chainsaw.
It's not the worst of the Chainsaw sequels/remakes, but this franchise to me is like Terminator. Just let the thing die already. Unfortunately it'll probably do well enough on Netflix that we'll get another in 2024.
