Netflixs Texas Chainsaw Massacre leaves little to the imagination. That goes first of all for its violence an orgy of splintered bones lopped off limbs and mutilated faces. In the gore department this umpteenth sequel has much more in common with the MPAA incensing slasher movies of the  80s than it does with Tobe Hoopers original 1974 backwoods nightmare whose title promised carnage it often implied instead of outright depicting.





The new Chainsaw is more explicit in another respect too. It takes all the subtext of Hoopers movie the class tension bubbling underneath its screaming madness and murder and grinds it into blunt text. Call that a real sign of the changing times: If grisliness in horror has fluctuated over the years there no mistaking the way the genre has increasingly made mincemeat of subtlety this past decade. Every chainsaw massacre now wants to be about more than just the massacre. And this one announces its  messages as loudly as a power tool revving and roaring in the dead of hellish night.


Here, once more a group of fresh faced city slickers steer off the beaten path and into certain doom in the boonies. This time though they are literal gentrifiers a group of young entrepreneurs who have snatched up the vacant properties of Harlow a real Texas town that disappeared off maps in the 1930s. Their aim? To found a bohemian hipster paradise a new Williamsburg of the Southwest.  Behold the horrors of late stage capitalism one of the zoomers says aloud butchering any possibility that this trend chasing franchise relaunch might let its themes speak for themselves.


Unfortunately for the interlopers, the slim population of Harlow includes an elderly but far from decrepit Leatherface. Almost 50 years after the events of Hoopers movie the rest of the Sawyer clan is long gone. Its lone surviving member now lives in an abandoned orphanage under the care of a kindly old woman  Alice Krige the kids unwisely unwittingly evict. Whats more improbable than a squealing cannibal laying low for half a century domesticated out of his fondness for cleavers and sledgehammers? How about that the madman now 75 if he has a day still moves with the speed and power of an alpha predator? The big guy must be on the same vitamin regimen as his kindred spirit in geriatric killing sprees Michael Myers.