Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a franchise with a fairly convoluted continuity with each new addition putting Leatherface with a new murderous family, producing around five different timelines. Well now we have a new addition and like the Halloween 2018 film, it’s a direct sequel with the same name that features the final girl from the original.
The film is a mixed bag. Even with the addition of Sally from the first film there’s very little that sets this apart as a TCM film. The uniqueness of the original is gone leaving behind something that is just like every other slasher. There’s also some rather gaping plot holes in a few places, some altogether quite pointless additions and it’s really hard to like pretty much any of the characters. It has some solid gore and nice cinematography at times but otherwise it’s rather flat.
2022 Bad Hombre
The characters are the most obvious issue. There’s a trend in films of presenting a generational animosity between characters and when this occurs the younger generation are usually insufferable with maybe a few token down to earth additions. No one would actually live stream a maniac with a chainsaw or refer to being ‘cancelled’. And the addition of disbelieving comments on live stream murders has been done to death. Of the four friends introduced to the viewer at the beginning, the character of Dante is probably the worst. The three female characters have their own issues but at least display some situational awareness and brief moments of intelligence, although that’s a far cry from being actually interesting. Dante’s fiancé Ruth is a fairly nothing character (I think she had maybe ten lines in total?), leaving just the assigned protagonists, sisters Mel and Lila.
The main problem with them is that the film didn’t seem to know which one it wanted to focus on, which one it wanted to be the designated final girl. Mel got the most screen time but Lila was set up several times to be the survivor being at odds with the rest of the group and having a tragic backstory (as a school shooting survivor). Every time it looked like Mel was out of commission, every pep talk that was given about how Lila would survive was always undercut really quickly by her attempts to fight Leatherface being interrupted by someone else. She never really got the chance to stand up in the way other female horror characters do, meaning that when the final girl eventually came into her title it felt a bit… unearned. Especially when contrasted to the original film and Sally’s much more hard won survival.
Speaking of Sally, while there’s definitely a feel of borrowed homework here with her inclusion as a much older obsessive adversary for the villain, unlike Halloween’s Lori Strode, she had very little impact. With a few small tweaks, she could have been removed from the story without any issue.
2022 Bad Hombre
In terms of plot, it was fairly average. There were quite a few contrived coincidences for things to work out the way they did and some characters who apparently became made of iron for brief periods since, while I’m no expert, being bisected with a chainsaw probably won’t leave you up to handling firearms. There were some additions that felt altogether pointless (just because every other movie has an end credit scene, doesn’t mean you have to) but the most bizarre plot choice was the set up surrounding Leatherface. This is a sequel, that is established and at the end of the first film Leatherface is an adult with at least a few family members. Yet for some reason when this one starts, he's in an orphanage, with the implication that he’s been there awhile, and seems to have put his face-wearing, chainsaw wielding past away. How did he get there? Why is he there? What happened to his brothers? The movie doesn’t know. It also means that the audience is deprived of some more of Leatherface’s crazy family members who are just as evil, if not more so, than the man himself.
Fans of the franchise might want to skip this one. Then again, they had to put up with The Next Generation so this probably won’t seem as bad in comparison. At the very least, there’s some solid gore to enjoy and it definitely lived up to the massacre part of it’s title.