LEATHERFACE Gets A Plot And Some Cast Members
There's some news in here, but first, during BAD’s month of sequels, let’s take a moment to reflect on the, well, the fucked lineage of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
* 1974; First film comes out; is a living nightmare put to celluloid; endures forever.
* 1986: Tobe Hooper makes The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 as part of a three-picture deal at Cannon. It’s critically reviled upon release and tanks; a generation who grew up with it eventually lauds it as a ballsy, left-turn sequel.
* 1990: New Line gets its mitts on the franchise and thinks Leatherface will jumpstart a new slasher franchise for them. It does not.
* 1993: Kim Henkel, co-writer of the 1974 original, commits The Return Of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to celluloid. A betting man in 1993 would be forgiven for thinking that the franchise was dead and buried with this one. Nope.
* 2003: Platinum Dunes kicks the whole thing in the ass and remakes the original, then in 2006 makes a prequel to its remake.
* By now I’m tired of typing, but there’s more to the story, you see.
* 2013: Millennium Films makes Texas Chainsaw 3D, a sequel to the original - the ORIGINAL original - that veers off into a miasma of predictable kills and reshoots, utterly forgettable aside from Sawyer Cousin/scream queen/absolute vision Alexandra Daddario.
It’s 2015. This poor franchise is as frazzled and roughed-up as Sally Hardesty in the back of that pickup truck in 1974. But the truck rolls on, and Millennium is doing a...a prequel to the original, I guess? Another reboot? I don’t know. I’m tired. Anyway, Leatherface (this new one, not the 1990 jam with Viggo Mortensen and Ken Foree) is an origin story. The hook is that the film follows four teens who escape a mental hospital with a nurse as hostage. By the end of the film, one of those teens will be revealed to be Leatherface. Not to spoil, but if one of them has jacked teeth and speaks in pig squeals, it is DEFINITELY that guy.
The not-hook of this new film is that Stephen Dorff will be playing a deranged sheriff in pursuit of the escaped maniacs. Additionally, Angela Bettis has been cast as the matriarch of the Sawyer clan (hey, did you know “Sawyer” is the name made up for Hooper’s 1986 sequel? In the original, there’s a sign at the gas station identifying its owner as W.E. Slaughter. All depends how subtle you like your puns, I guess). So if the Sawyer clan has a matriarch, then I guess whichever one of those kids is related to her is Leatherface? Unless the escaped teens are all siblings and one has a giant birthmark on his face and one gets sent to Vietnam at the end…
“Why on Earth would I watch this?” is something you might be asking right now. OCD is one reason; have you seen all the Texas Chainsaws? Why stop now? Also, this one’s being directed by Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, the helmers of Inside, which was kinda awesome. Oh, and it’ll be a real hoot to see what year this movie’s set, since Texas Chainsaw 3D was so chronologically confused that the only way the timeline makes sense is if this is a 40 year-old woman:
