There’s plenty of graphic violence here, but “Leatherface” is plot-driven rather than merely kill-driven. The future Leatherface is actually a victim in Sherwood’s scenario, which does the best it can to pull together various characters and reference points from mismatched prior “Chainsaw” entries into a cogent prequel. It’s a “Who’s the craziest?” contest in which very little merriment will be had. That massacre naturally attracts the still-furiously vengeful Hartman, while also putting mama Verna on the scent of her liberated kin. Their first stop is a roadside BBQ where the latter duo leave few other patrons alive. In the fracas, Lizzy is taken hostage by a fleeing group that includes not-entirely-gentle giant “Bud,” seemingly harmless Jackson (San Strike) and two extremely harmful (as well as over-sexed) individuals: Ike (James Bloor) and Clarice (Jessica Madsen). By no coincidence, a full-on riot breaks out, during which criminally insane residents kill various staff (plus a few of their own). Idealistic new nurse Lizzy (Vanessa Grasse) has the terrible luck to start work here on the day that mama Verna attempts to pay a visit. “Ten years later,” the now-heavyset, near-adult Jed, AKA Bud (Sam Coleman), is one patient among many at an institution for seriously troubled youths. He can’t pin a murder conviction on the “hillbilly trash” clan, but uses this latest incriminating incident to order their children seized by government authorities - allegedly for their own protection - in revenge. Unfortunately for the Sawyers, she was the beloved only child of Texas Ranger Hartman (Stephen Dorff). Later, the b-day boy Jed (Boris Kabakchief) lures a passing teen (Lorina Kamburova) into a decrepit barn, where she suffers a grisly death. Particularly given the angry popular rejection just handed genre rule-breaker “Mother!,” you’d think this respectable addition to an uneven but name-brand horror pic lineage would warrant better treatment.Īdmittedly, it doesn’t start out too promisingly, with a nasty 1955 rural Texas juvenile birthday-party scene in which the game “Pin the tail on the donkey” has apparently been replaced by “Torture the suspected pig-thief,” as directed by malevolent Sawyer family matriarch Verna (Lili Taylor). But it’s also an earnest and well-crafted attempt at course-correction, straying from stock slasher recyclage to provide a different story that actually connects a few dots in the very tangled cinematic “Chainsaw” universe to date. Sherwood and directed by the French duo Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo (“Inside”), this “origin story” is a somewhat mixed bag. Odder still then that after so many re-inventions of this particular wheel, to varying artistic and box-office rewards, that “Leatherface” should quietly premiere on DirecTV a month before being dumped into a handful of U.S. Considering the game-changing stature of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 original in the annals of horror cinema, it’s odd that “ The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” has had such a peculiar, erratic life in franchise terms.
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