Warning: Spoilers Ahead.
What’s the one thing you want when you got to see a “scary” movie? Grotesque images? Check. An interesting back-story? Check. The movie to be actually scary? This is where Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3-D fails and, unfortunately, completely ruins the flick for fans of the franchise.
Taking place after the arson of the Sawyer home in the original film, the movie picks up several years later, with Heather Miller (Alexandra Daddario) working in a dead end job at the local grocery store, when she receives a letter with the news of her late grandmother, Verna Carson (Marilyn Burns). Following the news, she travels to her grandmother’s now abandoned estate with her boyfriend Ryan (Tremaine Neverson), best friend Nikki (Tania Raymonde) and cook Kenny, along the way picking up a hitchhiker Darryl (Shaun Sipos). However, upon arrival to the deserted home of Verna, they discover it’s not as abandoned as once thought.
This movie. How do I say this politely? This movie stinks. It’s incredibly bad. Frankly, I’m embarrassed to have spent actual money to view this film.
Not that I expected much, but the acting, or lack thereof, is some of the worst I have seen in a very long time. I understand that this is meant to be a B-movie horror flick, but there is no excuse for acting this bad in the year 2013. For a movie that’s supposed to pay homage to a great series of truly horrifying films, it falls short in so many ways. The actors, while not necessarily stereotypical, are predictable. You can foresee every move they’ll make before Leatherface revs up his first chainsaw.
Yes, there’s more than one chainsaw.
The plot, or attempt at one, is at least interesting and entertaining. The movie skews the old reputations of Leatherface in an attempt to make the audience feel sympathetic to his plight, and in some ways it works. The “victims,” while not truly despicable, aren’t good people either. They all have their vices and flaws (ranging from infidelity to arson) that make them believable, but it wasn’t enough to justify their gruesome demises. Therefore the movie cannot justify Leatherface’s end goal.
After all that, one would hope the movie to be scary. Well, it isn’t in the slightest. Even the stereotypical “jump scares” in 3D fail to cause that oh-so-familiar jolt.
The movie can be fun and goofy, but that really isn’t what someone would expect going into a movie like this.
