When Halloween Kills came out last year and sucked right out loud, a fair number of its critics took the opportunity to reassess its predecessor, the 2018 legacyequel Halloween, and decide maybe it wasn’t as fabulous as everyone thought. But this is a nonsensical response; seeing how easy it was for the exact same personnel to so thoroughly botch an attempt to recreate that film’s peculiar cocktail of straight horror, sideways comedy, contemporary cultural commentary, and serious trauma talk made it clear that the previous picture was something of a miracle. 

And as if to underscore the point, Netflix’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the latest attempt to work the same magic on a venerable horror franchise, makes Halloween Kills look like, well, Halloween.

It opens with one of its most direct quotations from the original film – still photos and a John Larroquette voice-over, this time narrating a true-crime documentary on the brutal killings of the 1974 original. (“For the next hour, we’ll take you on a journey into one of Texas’s most famous unsolved murders.”) Much like the 2018 Halloween – a phrase I’m afraid you’ll read a lot in this review – this new Chainsaw Massacre is framed as a direct sequel to the original, erasing and ret-conning the events of the three sequels, the 2013 remake and its prequel, the previous direct sequel (2013’s Texas Chainsaw 3D), and its prequel (Leatherface, from 2017, not to be confused with Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III). Confused?

So we once again begin with a group of youths driving the back roads of Texas. Melody (Sarah Yarkin) and Dante (Jacob Latimore) are a pair of social media-wielding entrepreneurs en route to Harlow, Texas – a deep-in-the-heart “ghost town,” all but abandoned, that they hope to turn into a hipster enclave. Dante brings his girlfriend (Jessica Allain); Melody drags along Lila (Elsie Fisher), her sister, which we know because she calls her “sis” in their first interaction, as sisters do.

So yes, as you’ve gathered, Chris Thomas Devlin’s screenplay (culled from a story by Don’t Breathe and Evil Dead remake collaborators Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues) has all sorts of touches to make it relatable to Today’s Troubled Teens™. There’s an immediate culture war stand-off with a gun-toting, pickup truck-driving, diesel smoke-spewing red-state redneck (Moe Dunford). Lila, our trauma avatar, is a school shooting survivor (from “Stonebrook High”, an allusion to Marjorie Stoneman High that seems kinda tacky!). This group is followed by a busload investors and influencers, who descend on the town and start snapping Insta pics. And later, when Leatherface steps onto their party bus, everyone raises their phones, while one threatens, “Try anything, you get cancelled, bro.”

(I feel like I should step in here to assure you that I have made none of this up.)

At any rate, thanks to a property dispute – yes, really – these pesky kids give Leatherface’s (adopted?) mother a heart attack, and when she dies in an ambulance, he starts killing people. Director David Blue Garcia trots out the iconography (the human skin face, the chainsaw, etc.) but doesn’t seem to understand any of it; it’s like an entire movie of that dumb moment from the prologue of Halloween where the podcaster is holding out the Michael Myers mask for no good reason.

And, much like the 2018 Halloween (I warned you), Texas Chainsaw Massacre gives us the triumphant return of the original film’s long-simmering, traumatized Final Girl. Sally Haredesty, we are told, “became a Ranger here in Texas. She musta looked for that maniac for 30, 40 years.” Once Leatherface starts killing, Sally – clad in a cowboy hat and Jane Campion hair – swoops back into action. But this thread carries zero weight, because the original Sally, Marilyn Burns, died in 2014; we have a long-standing attachment to Jamie Lee Curtis that we simply do not have for Nu Sally, the Irish stage actress Olwen Fouéré, and the cringe-worthy attempts to create a similar personal dynamic between her and the mask-clad killer land with a thud. By the time she growls, “I’m the one that got away, and I’m here to make sure you don’t, motherfucker,” well, I was longing for death myself.

Fisher, like Fouéré, does the best she can with this gruel, and her character is initially intriguing – rebellious against her sister, resistant to this dopey idea, and fascinated by the conservative culture she’s been airdropped into. But those quirks fade away by the second act, and any way you slice it, it’s profoundly depressing that this is her first leading role since Eighth Grade. Her momentary nuances aside, the script is weak sauce – dumb dialogue, obvious story turns, and kills you see coming a mile away.

Those kills boast a couple of decent shock scares, but little else. The grisly violence is wince-inducing but a miscalculation, since the original wasn’t scary because of its gore – it was because of its intensity and tension, and none of this comes anywhere close. (There is one clever bit of suspense with a swinging kitchen door, but that probably only lands because it’s reminiscent of that chillingly slammed door in the original.)

Ultimately, the problem with Netflick Chainsaw Massacre is that it’s a ceaselessly slick sequel to one of the grimiest movies ever made, and so beyond the storytelling style, the sheer look, the feel, the aesthetic reads like something from another planet. It all feels like a baffling miscalculation – if you’re trying to erase the sequels and replicate the original, then make something recognizably reminiscent of it. Don’t just shoplift the character into a lazy, substandard 2020s slasher movie and call it a day.

I’m sure its creators thought they were making something “for the fans,” or restoring its spotty legacy, or some such nonsense. (One of the producers is the original film’s co-writer, Kim Henkel.) But this isn’t just a bad movie; for anyone who loves or cares about the original, it’s a profoundly depressing one.

“Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is now streaming on Netflix, because they made us hold this review until the last possible second.

D-