Directed by Alexandre Bustillo
and Julien Murphy. Starring Stephen Dorff, Lili Taylor, ,Sam Strike, Vanessa Grasse, Finn Jones, Same Coleman,
Jessica Madsen, and James Bloor.
Of all
the horror franchises that are out there, the one that has been literally treated
like a victim in its films is the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series. How many
times has this series been rebooted, re-imagined, or recycled? That would be a
daring assignment to figure out with probably no real satisfaction at the end,
just a slippery slope into further mediocrity. And when you’re about to land at
the bottom of the barrel you do an origins film.
Leatherface
is a prequel to at least 2013’s Texas Chainsaw 3D, a terrible film in its own
right. Now why do I say at least? Mainly because I see listings that associate
this with the films in the franchise from 1974, 1986, 1990, and 1994 (that
being The Next generation, a film thrown in the trash until stars Renee
Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey hit the big time). Who knows? The film
follows a young Leatherface from his early days of getting a chainsaw and
gutting a fella at his fifth birthday party, which is slightly more painful
than a trip to Chuck E. Cheese. Eventually the Sawyer clan, led by the
matriarch Verna (Lili Taylor) push their meat harvesting activities too far and
end up killing the sheriff’s daughter and the wee Leatherface is taken away to
an asylum until he is old enough to do whatever he was going to do. I do wonder
why none of the family members were arrested for the crime.
We do a
time jump and discover an asylum that is full of unscrupulous employees except
for the new nurse Lizzy (Grasse). A riot breaks out and Lizzy is taken captive
by Ike (Bloor) and Clarice (Madsen) as Jackson (Strike) and Bud (Coleman) go
along for the ride. They go on a death race to nowhere while being chased by
the same sheriff (Stephen Dorff) as we try to figure out which of these fugitives
is going to wind up being the legendary killer Leatherface.
Leatherface
is your basic modern era horror film that tries to be coy with the reveal of
who ends up being the legendary Sawyer, which is all this film has going for
it. The characters are all boxed in stereotypes and the filmmaker’s poor
attempts at making a plot twist backfires horribly. It will be solved before
they even leave the hospital. It’s amazing how stupid characters can be written
in a film and I understand that many of these individuals are deranged, but I
don’t buy the idea that has the concept of self preservation at one moment, but
they don’t at another integral scene. What makes this so difficult to
understand is that these people act manic all the time, leading to a sort of
cancelling themselves out. Even with the name Leatherface in bold letters to
open the film, this is a poor paint by numbers horror film that is banking on
the many past glories (and failures).
I’m not
big on reboots. I’m even less interested in origin stories, particularly with horror
film icons. Rob Zombie made that mistake with his version of Halloween in that
he gave us too much back story on the character of Michael Myers as opposed to
Carpenter’s approach of the mysterious Boogeyman (I’m not counting the sequels,
but comparing Halloween to Halloween). Leatherface pulls the same mistakes by
giving us not only a back story that eliminates the mystery that a man in a
mask has, but manages to do it with some of the worst concepts I’ve seen in a
very long time. Honestly, the opening birthday scene could have been taken out
of an issue of Cracked or Mad magazine. It’s totally ridiculous.
