Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) review

It's simultaneously insane but not surprising that every new horror reboot I see makes Halloween Kills look better and better. Goddamn this movie is pathetic. It's desperately trying to be the 2018 Halloween:

• Returning heroine from the original movie who has been preparing for a face-off with the villain for all this time

• Sloppy themes dealing with trauma

• Gorier/more over the top kills

• Social media influencers unknowingly bringing the threat

• Gen Z doesn't think take the situation seriously at first

• Nationwide fascination with the events of the original movie as a true crime case

... you get the idea, but with absolutely NONE of the bare minimum levels of effort or skill that was put into a movie that movie work, but it’s coupled with a complete misunderstanding of what makes The Texas Chain Saw Massacre scary as a movie and Leatherface scary as a character. Leatherface is not the primary antagonist of the 1974 movie, he’s not Jason fucking Voorhees, he’s simply a part of the family who does the dirty work for them. That’s it, he’s just a mentally handicapped guy that gets manipulated into killing people for his family, he's not an omnipotent, supernatural force of evil.

The 1974 movie feels very unique, genuine, unconventional, and like you were just dropped into this weird and fucked up situation. The movie has a feeling of heat and sweat, and the cinematography really enhanced the feeling of the heat that the characters were experiencing. The 2022 movie is just a formulaic, generic, forgettable, over-heightened piece of shit. The cinematography is nothing memorable at all, it just looks like any other modern horror movie, which is something that you absolutely cannot say about the original film. The characters in the original, while not the deepest characters ever put onscreen, feel like genuine characters, similar to how the characters in The Thing or Alien feel like real people that you’d just know in your day to day life. In the 2022 movie, the cast is full of boring and insulting caricatures, all with generic, bizarre and laughable attempts at character traits.

The writers also desperately try to cram in as much relevant social commentary as humanly possible to make it feel smarter; gentrification, liberals vs conservatives, social media influencers, and some WEIRD flashbacks to school shootings??? Really? I know Halloween (2018) had allusions to school shootings in it and I knowwww this movie has to do everything that movie did just way stupider… but like, for this? All the hackneyed “commentary” will do is make the movie feel dated even faster than it already would.

I almost listed the gore effects in this movie as a positive, but then even that’s not good enough to salvage this movie. The kills are not blunt or visceral enough to be genuinely frightening, and they’re not goofy enough to be funny (except the literal last 10 seconds, that may have been the hardest I’ve laughed since my last Neil Breen viewing), just boring and forgettable, just like everything else about it.

It was the least inspired movie I’ve seen in a long time and it’s the worst movie I’ve seen since… honestly I don’t even know when.

Also shouldn’t Leatherface be like 80 years old at least by this point in time??