“Welcome to Texas, motherfuckers!” This is a line you’d expect in a 2012 flick with Texas in the title; however, here the character yelling the cliché is a girl who is not from Texas, yelling it at Leatherface, who obviously is. That sort of backwards-ness sums up this movie pretty well. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it. But probably not in the way the filmmakers had hoped. To set the stage, I have enjoyed every previous TCM film to some degree or another, some (far) more than others.
Let’s start with the good. It’s fun to see cameos from Texas Chain alums Gunnar Hansen, Bill Moseley and Marilyn Burns. I also like that in this day and age, the filmmakers decided to go for a sequel to the original, instead of rebooting the franchise from scratch for the third time.
And now the bad (which kind of also makes it good). It’s takes place at Halloween. That normally is a plus in my book, but I hate it when movies “take place at Halloween”, and all that entails is someone mentioning that it’s Halloween. There is no ‘Ween vibe in this film. The characters are some of the dumbest I can think of in recent memory. Stupid decisions from the get go, which makes it feel a bit more like a parody of a slasher movie. This also makes it hard to feel sorry for any of them. For real, Leatherface is the smartest cat in the movie. And this includes the bumbling police department, led by the ineffectual Sheriff Hooper.
The dialog is terrible. Like, really bad. The exposition, when the main girl is discovering the history of the Sawyer family, is just too much. And then the filmmakers feel compelled to use more exposition and flashbacks to remind us of events that we had just seen in this film 45 minutes earlier.
After an hour and thirty minutes have passed, and the credits are rolling, there are so many moments of lazy writing and complete and utter character stupidity that it’s hard to take the movie seriously, and certainly it would be impossible to put it anywhere near the first three films. But it was fun. I hate the so-bad-it’s-good thing, because that can often be pretty diminutive, but it completely applies to Texas Chainsaw 3D. And we didn’t even watch it in 3D.
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