But when the main character says he’s from Texas and his mother has died, horror die-hards will tense up in recognition. It takes places in a world seemingly distant from Texas massacres.
More novel is the slickly entertaining “Fresh,” an urban horror story about the hell of modern dating in which a single woman meets the perfect guy, who it turns out isn’t. The result is a boringly rote series of slayings. It abandons the nuance of the original, adopting the Gleiberman view of Leatherface as a one-note killing machine. The recent Netflix reboot of “T exas Chainsaw” has the opposite problem. He is closer to the misunderstood creature from “Frankenstein” than to a garden-variety slasher villain.
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Without resorting to a tedious back story, the movie positions Leatherface as a monster and a victim, bullied into his dirty work by his cannibalistic family. While he is introduced committing some of the most startling kills in cinematic history, the majestically maniacal last act of “Chain Saw” shifts our perspective on him from hulking slayer to stammering stooge. Gleiberman was on solid ground with “Halloween,” whose killer is a psychology-less abstraction, murdering without motivation, but Leatherface is more than just a boogeyman.
“It expresses his identity,” he writes of Leatherface, “and his identity is that he has no identity.” In a Variety review last year, Owen Gleiberman drew the ire of horror fans when he called “Halloween” a “knockoff” of “Chain Saw,” then defended his stance in an essay locating the signature of both movies in the killer’s mask. While every bit as intense as its title, its violence is staged with misdirection absent from the sequels and remakes.Īnother misperception, internalized even by experienced and admiring critics, involves its most famous character, Leatherface.
The movie is less bloody than its reputation.
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Despite its unsubtle title, this is a formally exquisite art film, packed full of gorgeously nightmarish images, as poetic as they are deranged. The peculiar strengths of “Chain Saw” have rarely been replicated because they are often misunderstood.
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