Because of their relatively concise nature, it isn’t often that a slasher comes across like a hodgepodge of several scripts. Usually, the film wastes no time getting to the blood and guts and leaves the more sophisticated horror narratives to the more daring filmmakers. Texas Chainsaw Massacre feels like it started off heading in that elevated horror direction, but then took a whiplash-inducing left turn towards violence.

In the spirit of Halloween (2018), Texas Chainsaw Massacre picks up the threads of the original film’s story, only 50 years later. Sisters Melody (Sarah Yarkin) and Lila (Elsie Fisher) are in Texas to auction off property that Melody and her partner Dante (Jacob Lattimore) have purchased, but they find one building occupied by a sickly old woman and her mysterious son. As one might expect, a seemingly innocent effort to modernize the small community leads to Leatherface (Mark Burnham) being let loose.

There’s a bit more to Leatherface’s killing spree, but it isn’t much more complicated than "big tall man kill lots of people wearing human face as mask." The film tries to humanize him just a little bit, but it’s not enough to change the status quo. Leatherface is still a mindless killing machine, and director David Blue Garcia lets him indulge those violent urges to a staggering degree.

Horror fans that are just looking for a tight 85 minutes of exceedingly gory kills and tense cat and mouse chases will find that Texas Chainsaw Massacre delivers. In 1974 there wasn’t a lot that the filmmakers could do with a madman wielding a chainsaw that would look believable. In 2022, special effects and makeup have evolved so much that any permutation of chainsaw-through-flesh is possible. At times, the violence is overwhelming because of the level of gore on display and the relentless nature of the kills.

Everything around the horror elements, though, operates as if it's part of a different movie. Lila has a backstory that is unbelievably forced, borderline insensitive, and offers the wrong kind of payoff. There's a subtext that feels like a statement about the gentrification of small towns, but it quickly becomes an afterthought amidst the gore. And a cheap play to copy Halloween (2018) by bringing back the having the original survivor, Sally Hardesty (played by a different actress named Olwen Fouere), is laughably mishandled.

Each plot point seems as if it was a layer of a much more sophisticated movie that was ripped clean of anything resembling character development or allegory. All that is left is 85 minutes of Leatherface dismembering, mutilating, and decapitating a bunch of disposable extras.

If the point was to make Texas Chainsaw Massacre just another slasher film but with plenty of stomach-turning practical effects and a literal bus-load of dead bodies, then the filmmakers succeeded. But the presence of writer/producer Fede Alvarez (Evil Dead, Don’t Breathe) suggests that there was originally a lot more to the script but it was thinned out to ensure a kill was only just a few minutes away. What’s left after all that trimming is barely a movie and hardly worth most people's 90 minutes.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre is available now on Netflix.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a sequel to the 1973 horror-slasher film that follows a group of young entrepreneurial adults who find themselves in a waking nightmare. Melody, her teenage sister Lila, and their friends head to the remote town of Harlow, Texas, to start an idealistic new business venture. But their dream soon turns into a waking nightmare when they accidentally disrupt the home of Leatherface, the deranged serial killer whose blood-soaked legacy continues to haunt the area’s residents — including Sally Hardesty, the sole survivor of his infamous 1973 massacre who’s hell-bent on seeking revenge.