After a big box office opening for the 2018 Halloween sequel, Legacy Entertainment decided to hop on the horror follow up trend with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2022. Going into this movie, I expected it to be a cash grab that didn’t care much about the original’s approach to horror. While I was right in thinking that it was just made to get money, it did have an attempt at mimicking the feel of the original. The beginning is very cool. It does a documentary style recounting of the prior movie which feels similar to the style of the 1974 classic. Once this short segment is over however, we are smothered with the filmmakers trying to remind us that this takes place in the current day. The overuse of tech in this movie is plentiful. In one scene, a character is presented with a blood soaked LeatherFace and says, “Try anything and you’re canceled bro.” Later, the film mimics the end scene of the original with the final girl riding away in the self-steering car. While the original uses this type of scene to make one of the most memorable moments in horror history, this movie repeats it with a tacky twist that falls flat.

This movie also takes strong stances on many issues which don’t affect the plot. It brings up gun violence, school shootings and racism. I think that the racism conversation, while not essential to the plot, is appropriate to be talked about seeing as the movie takes place in the deep south. The other two subplots seem extremely unneeded. In my opinion, the characters of a Texas Chainsaw movie do not need prior trauma; they are going to get plenty of trauma from the experiences during the film anyways.

While the original movie has varying characters with at least some layers and development, the new film has only one likable character: Dante. The original final girl, Sally, is also in this movie, but she feels forced in. It gives another final girl for the viewers to pay attention to. Three people still in the climax is too many for a single killer film like this.

Some issues that I have with this movie lie with the continuity errors. In the original, LeatherFace lives with his family, but in this one, a direct sequel to the first mind you, the whole plot hinges on him living with an old woman in a foster home since his youth. So did he grow up there and then move out and back in? It just doesn’t make much sense.

One thing that made the original so scary was that the cannibalistic family was made up of realistic people. They didn’t have powers or demonic connections—they were just psychopaths. This movie throws all of that out the door. LeatherFace is supposed to be 60 in this film yet he regularly sprints around without alerting anyone. He takes multiple point-blank shotgun shots to the chest, almost drowns twice and takes an upper cut from a chainsaw to the face yet he IS STILL ALIVE.

This sequel takes everything good from the original and stomps on it. Without a doubt, I give it two out of five chainsaws. Fun gore, but disappointing all around.