{"id":26801,"date":"2017-10-30T07:15:03","date_gmt":"2017-10-30T11:15:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=26801"},"modified":"2017-10-30T07:15:03","modified_gmt":"2017-10-30T11:15:03","slug":"leatherface-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2017\/10\/30\/leatherface-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Leatherface (2017)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This is the story of Leatherface. Again. No, \u201cThe Beginning\u201d was not his origin, \u201cLeatherface\u201d is. I\u2019m not sure what \u201cThe Beginning\u201d was supposed to be. \u201cLeatherface\u201d is the official prequel to the iconic movie maniac, they promise. And once again, like \u201cThe Beginning,\u201d 2017\u2019s \u201cLeatherface\u201d is really just a tired, nasty, unpleasant road film following a group of psychopaths. Leatherface\u2019s actual origin is reserved for the final ten minutes where he just reverts to Leatherface mode because\u2014um\u2014it\u2019s familiar! Familiar is good, right? Once again, no one seems to be interested in actually dissecting the madness of Leatherface, or why and how his persona of wearing human skin and carrying a chainsaw relates to him. In the original Tobe Hooper masterpiece,<\/p>\n

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Leatherface was a force of violence and sexual confusion that used his chainsaw to rape, and violate his victims. \u201cLeatherface\u201d just seems to be interested in squeezing in as many gory kill scenes and gross out moments of torture that it can in its ninety minute time frame. Nothing makes the slightest bit of sense and we\u2019re never given the slightest bit of insight in to the character before he became Leatherface. He just goes from point A to point Z in seconds, and we\u2019re supposed to accept that as the molding of a maniacal serial killer. I\u2019ve read essays on movie blogs that have given so much more insight and poetic analyses in the persona of Leatherface in the first Tobe Hooper film than all the alleged \u201corigin\u201d has even bothered with. It\u2019s just a series of nonsense that, ironically enough, cribs from Rob Zombie\u2019s \u201cThe Devil\u2019s Rejects.\u201d<\/p>\n

The characters here are evil because they have to be evil to give us a movie, meanwhile directors Maury and Bustillo completely waste the only strong actor in the bunch, Lili Taylor. She plays demented matriarch Verna Sawyer who wreaks havoc on those that cross the Sawyers, and influences her children in to doing the same. Her youngest, Jedediah, is given a chainsaw on his birthday and encouraged to murder an alleged ranch thief, but he simply can\u2019t find the strength to do so. When a young girl is led to the ranch by Jed, she\u2019s viciously murdered, and her father, local sheriff Hartman vows revenge on Verna, taking away all of her children. Years later, the children are institutionalized, and new nurse Elizabeth forms a bond with the Sawyer kids, now grown adults.<\/p>\n

When Verna fails to take back Jed, she incites a riot which leads to the Sawyer clan violently escaping with Elizabeth as their hostage, and they seek to flee back home. Along the way, there\u2019s a ton of meaningless violence that counts as plot progression and, yet again, we\u2019re never given the slightest bit of insight in to the mind set of these characters. They\u2019re lunatics, and hillbillies, and that\u2019s about enough for the script. \u201cLeatherface\u201d never amounts to terror or pure chaos, no matter how hard it tries, and it just does as much as it can to exercise is nastiness with plenty of blood splatter, and evisceration, all filmed in that delightful brown-orange tint that adds the Platinum Dunes aesthetic. \u201cLeatherface\u201d is just an absolute waste of time. It\u2019s pointless, it\u2019s tedious, it\u2019s dull, and worst of all, it\u2019s lazy.<\/p>\n