Along with Melody’s sister Lila (Elsie Fisher), a traumatized school shooting survivor, they drive across Leatherface country to Harlow, where they plan to host a pitch party for a busload of anonymous investors. There’s a body count to compile, courtesy of Melody (Sarah Yarkin) and Dante (Jacob Latimore), two social media influencers who buy Harlow, a Texas ghost town, with plans to revitalize the area for hipster creatives. There’s no time for pesky character development or convincing human behavior.
#TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE ANALYZED MOVIE#
After all, the movie runs for just 81 minutes. She’s given one or two small scenes to show her journey, only to be unceremoniously disposed of when she faces off with Leatherface. (Perhaps now is a good time to warn you, there will be spoilers throughout this review.) She’s the resident Dick Halloran from The Shining (1980)-introduced early in the proceedings as a possible solution to the bloodshed. Unfortunately, the scenario doesn’t make much use of Sally. But, alas, Marilyn Burns, who played Sally, died in 2014, so the filmmakers recast her with Irish performer Olwen Fouéré, a sinewy presence with hardened eyes and leathery skin. Copying Green’s concept, the new movie, which debuted on Netflix, brings back Sally Hardesty, the survivor of the 1974 film. Screenwriter Chris Thomas Devlin replicates that idea for Texas Chainsaw Massacre, working from a story by Fede Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues (who made another reboot, The Evil Dead, in 2013). Coupled with a committed performance by Jamie Lee Curtis, it was a novel idea. Green’s film imagined that the survivor of Michael Myers’ killing spree in 1978 became a rugged, traumatized, yet battle-ready militant bent on taking down her oppressor. The latest entry, titled Texas Chainsaw Massacre, positions itself as a direct sequel to Hooper’s original, following the example set by David Gordon Green’s 2018 requel, Halloween. Sequels, reboots, origin stories, and now, a retconned sequel-or a requel, to use the parlance of our times. In the years since, seven movies have tried to capitalize on the legacy of Hooper’s original two.
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Everything that came later is just Hollywood banking on the moneymaking potential of the movie maniac Hooper created. Thus, everything that needed to be said about the chainsaw-wielding Leatherface, cannibal families, and yuppies voyaging into the Texas backwoods, Hooper said it from a modern and post-modern approach.
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What would be the point? So, he went metatextual and turned his follow-up into the blackest of satires, leaning into the material’s much-studied symbolism and turning the original on its head. Hooper knew he couldn’t repeat the original when The Cannon Group approached him about a sequel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986). Hooper’s unhinged perspective delivered something unsettling and singular. Tobe Hooper made The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in 1974, and it still feels like something we’re not supposed to be seeing.