Review- TEXAS CHAINSAW 3D

Texas Chainsaw 3D (Lionsgate, 2013)

The seventh film in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series disregards all of the rest except for the original 1974 film. There will be a good amount of SPOILERS here, so proceed with caution. This film starts out with a montage of the events of the original movie during the opening credits (in 3-D). After the events in the original, the girl who escaped gets dropped off at the police station. The movie begins with the local police calling for Jed (Leatherface) to give himself up. The family has relatives who came out with guns and are all holed up inside the house. The sheriff has called for back-up and was trying to keep the situation from escalating when out of the blue a band of good ol' boys show up and decide to give the family a what-for style of justice. A Molotov cocktail is thrown, shots are pumped into the house, and the place burns down. All of the cars are authentic to the era, circa 1973. This is important later on.

As the night comes down the fire burns itself out. While they are going through the ashes looking for bodies, one of the vigilantes stumbles upon a survivor, a 27 year old woman with an infant child, hiding in the area where the family stored the cars (seen in the original). He kicks her head in, takes the baby and gives it to his wife who was waiting in their truck.

Fast forward to the present. A girl and her boyfriend are interrupted during foreplay when a FedEx envelope arrives informing her that her grandmother died and that she has inherited her estate. She confronts her parents who inform that yes, she is “adopted” and warn her not to go looking into her family history. Of course she ignores this, and her and her boyfriend and two other friends get into an older model (maybe '90s) Volkswagon van, in a nod to the original. There are many nods to the original throughout, and it is apparent that the filmmakers are all fans of the original film. Like the original, they almost hit a hitchhiker who they give a ride with them to the house. They meet the lawyer who gives the girl the keys to the place and a letter from her grandma which he urges her to read. Of course she doesn't read it.

I'll skip ahead several parts. The head of the vigilante mob is now the mayor, and the deputy in the beginning is now the sheriff. The typical flimsy scenarios unfold. People act illogically and start getting killed. As it turns out, the girl is cousins with Leatherface. When Jed goes on a rampage from the basement of his grandmother's estate where he has lived since 1973 (when the original film's story took place), she is part of his prey. Kids get killed and of course she escapes, making it to the police station. The sheriff and the mayor are arguing about how to handle this, apparently completely aware that this homicidal maniac has resided in this town the entire time but apparently not lifting a finger to do anything about it because they swept the entire vigilante mob justice thing under the rug, keeping it a dirty town secret. My suspension of disbelief is slipping...

The sheriff just happens to leave the evidence box on this case in the room with her, unattended, while arguing with the mayor about how to handle this. She goes through the files and the sheriff kept all of his original reports, which she read. The sheriff also apparently kept the newspaper of the event in with the official police file. She seems to snap at the knowledge that they murdered her family...who were murderers themselves. I am officially lost at this point, my suspension of disbelief broken by the mediocre writing.

The stupidity continues when the sheriff and mayor allow a lone cop to enter the house. Oh, but he's okay, because he can do video chat with them with his phone. He has his gun in one hand, and his smart phone in the other, showing them the horrors he discovers as he follows the trail of blood into the basement. I'll give you one guess what happens next.

The girl is on the run. She calls the lawyer who handled the estate, and he meets her at a bar and tells her everything. As the mayor and his buddy from the original gang try to catch her at this bar, she cuts his face with his knife, which supposedly shows how insane she is or will be or whatever. The deputy catches the girl. It turns out that the deputy is the mayor's son. Oh! Didn't see that one coming. The mayor wants to take her to the old abandoned yet remarkably clean meat packing plant so that he can end her line once and for all. In one of the few scenes that makes sense in this act, the sheriff is calling out to other officers over the radio that they are taking the girl to the meat packing plant. He wants to put a stop to it. Jed/ Leatherface just happened to be pushing the car into the corral at the time and overheard this and grabbed a chainsaw and headed there himself. See, this part actually makes sense. So they tie the girl up and are going to kill her, only Jed finds the girl first and sees the S brand, the family crest which they had on a necklace, on her breast and realizes that she is his cousin so he frees her. Commence groaning.

This is where this movie completely circles down the drain. Leatherface frees her and kills the mayor while the sheriff just stands there with his gun drawn, allowing this to happen out of some stupid sense of guilt over the events 40 years ago. Stupid. She refers to Jed as “cous” and they both go back to the house together to live. Completely, totally stupid. You want to know what sucks even harder? The girl was an infant in 1973. So was I. I'll be 40 in July. She didn't look a day past 22-23. Leatherface would be a 60 year old man by now, at least. The sheriff and mayor should have been retired. None of this makes any sense! This movie didn't take place in the past. The cars and cell phones and everything were all modern. This is just stupid, nonsensical storytelling. Oh, and there's a scene at the end of the credits which also completely sucks.

Junk Food For Thought rating: 1 out of 5.

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