‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ Review: Been There, Sawed That

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticI’m all for bad horror movies with short running times. (It lessens the pain.) And there are classics of horror cinema that are notably compact, like the 1931 “Frankenstein,” with a twisty tumultuous plot that plays out in just 71 minutes, or the original 1974 version of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” which achieved its slow-burn descent into the abyss in just 83 minutes.But the new, garishly crude, bluntly overlit, what-you-saw-is-what-you-get “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” which in case you’re counting is the eighth “Chainsaw” movie since the original (you‘d need a serious flowchart to diagram where the sequels meet the reboots meet the origin stories meet the what-the-hell-let’s-just-do-this-again whatevers), achieves a running time of 82 minutes only because there simply isn’t much to it.

It’s set in the present day, 50 years after the original, which means that Leatherface must be pushing 70 (in a freshly cut mask of human skin, he doesn’t look a day over 65), but it would be generous to call the film a continuation of the “Chainsaw” saga.

It’s more like a blood-drenched but unscary footnote. A group of Gen-Z entrepreneurs — snowflake “idealists” from Austin, with venture capital behind them — show up in the Texas town of Harlow, which looks like the set of an old Western.

These young missionaries have arranged to auction off the town to investors who will turn the abandoned storefronts into restaurants, galleries, comic-book stores, you name it.