Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)

"I need ammunition, not a ride". 

I suppose those acclaimed, defiant words of Ukrainian president Zelensky already appear on bumper stickers on sale in small rural gas stations in Texas. I stopped at a couple on my way back from viewing The Great American Eclipse in Tennessee in late August 2107. 

The whole "Don't Mess with Texas" vibe is practically a movie genre of its own and it permeates the perpetually-stalled Leatherface horror franchise, really a collection of orphaned stand-alones, rather like its iconic killer here. 

Netflix's latest edition is really a motley collection of characters and familiar off-the-shelf-parts (redneck cops, Confederate battle flag, the gas station shop etc) all wrapped around one key scene which, I suppose, gives the film its reason to exist — the gory carving up of a load of millennial influencers on a bus which begins with them all whipping out their phones to live feed their own slaughter. Mild drollery followed by full on carnage, yet still not quite remarkable enough to justify all the rest of the padding, which includes a half-hearted effort to bring back the survivor from the 1974 original. (More Dan Aykroyd in Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) than Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween (2018)). 

And once again we see the determination of producers to adopt a point of view carefully calibrated to fully alienate neither the city mice nor their country cousins.