Texas Chainsaw is a by the book the horror film that defies the books it’s following and in the process becomes a convoluted mess.
Prior to this the film is mediocre but solidly crafted big
budget horror film. There are attractive but forgettable people heading to a destination
all but tailored to be their demise. There’s a general atmosphere of darkness. There
are little callbacks to the original franchise that are needless but nice.
There’s even a mid-portion to the film that’s genuinely rather scary and
thrilling. I wish the film had stuck with this tone and these thrills because they're well-staged and a lot of fun. If the film had gone this route, it might have redeemed itself.
But then the film goes for something so bizarre that it’s
simply baffling. It attempts to turn the villain into the protagonist, in part
by largely ignoring the fact he’s just killed a bunch of people. And I think it
worked, but I also think it may have been the stupidest and most confusing
decision a film could have done. It’s an incredibly offputting turn of events
that comes so out of left field and is given so little time to develop that it
makes very little sense. It also undermines what little momentum the film had
going for it and in turn its ability to scare us, as pseudo-villains take up
the role of killing our main characters (which adds further to the convolution of
this).
Texas Chainsaw has
its moments, but it descends into hackneyed, convoluted, uninteresting
storytelling.
Grade: D
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