Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Directed by David Blue Garcia, Texas Chainsaw Massacre follows a group of friends, including Sarah Yarkin’s Melody and Elsie Fisher’s Lila, as they travel to an abandoned town for business and eventually run afoul of Mark Burnham’s long-dormant Leatherface. Filmmaker Garcia, working from Chris Thomas Devlin’s screenplay, delivers a predictably erratic endeavor that suffers from an overly familiar, almost generic opening stretch, and it’s clear, certainly, that Garcia’s slick, post-Scream approach to the material seems to be paving the way for yet another disappointing horror-movie sequel – with the less-than-promising atmosphere compounded by one-dimensional, one-note protagonists that are hardly as sympathetic or compelling as one might’ve hoped. There’s little doubt, however, that such concerns are rendered moot by the inevitable arrival of the series’s iconic villain, as Garcia does a superb job of infusing certain key scenes and sequences with a tension (and brutality) that proves impossible to resist – with this undoubtedly true of an early interlude detailing one character’s efforts to escape a van before Leatherface catches up with her. And although Olwen Fouere’s Sally Hardesty feels as though she’s been awkwardly shoe-horned into the proceedings, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, buoyed by a mid-movie set-piece wherein Leatherface chainsaws his way through a party-bus full of obnoxious millennials, builds towards an engaging climax that’s capped off with an astonishingly mean-spirited (and completely satisfying) final shot – which does, in the end, cement the picture’s place as a solid slasher that ultimately fares better than one might’ve initially anticipated.

*** out of ****