Last Updated on July 14, 2024 by FANGORIA Staff

What do you hope for when they announce a new Texas Chainsaw film? Whatโ€™s on your list of essential inclusions, new directions, good choices? I think we each have our own checklists, and that those checklists are as unique and as wonderful as each of us. One manโ€™s peak is another manโ€™s gutter.

Today we must once again ask ourselves that question as Netflix drops the full trailer for its ninth Leatherface to-do, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Is it everything you dreamed, or everything you dreaded? Letโ€™s take a look.

There are pros and cons in here.

We start with standard-issue slasher protagonists โ€” a bunch of young people about whom I will almost certainly not care when their time comes. A TIME-HONORED TRADITION. So far, so good.

If Texas Chainsaw 3D can reproduce the original house exactly, why fudge it here? Points off on the pedantry scale.

I am weirdly on board with the โ€œSally Hardesty in 2018 Jamie Lee Curtis drag but add a cowboy hatโ€ presented by Olwen Fouรฉrรฉ. Itโ€™s perhaps a little โ€œwe have Laurie Strode at home,โ€ but Sallyโ€™s the OG, legacy sequels are in right now, and itโ€™d be foolish for this production to not capitalize on that trend, despite just about everyone from the original film being dead. Iโ€™m calling this a Good Move.

Have movies ever presented a normal person with newspaper clippings glued to a wall? Lotta scrapbooking slander in cinema.

Bulgaria looks enough like Texas, I suppose. Is that due to Texan director David Blue Garcia? Possibly! (But that shot of Leatherface in the field of sunflowers flirts with some kinda ersatz A24 energy; carefulโ€ฆ)

And is that Alice Krige I spy as a heretofore unseen member of the Slaughter/Sawyer/Whoever family? Iโ€™ll be honest, it used to irk me how every film seemed to introduce more and more family members โ€” after 1986, itโ€™s never been (Chop) topped, so why bother? โ€” but Iโ€™ve come to look forward to finding those weird new colors in the crayon box. You never know when youโ€™ll get a Viggo Mortensen or Tonie Perensky in the mix. Looking forward to Ms. Krigeโ€™s work here.

A bus full of tourists attempting to stop a chainsaw-wielding Leatherface byโ€ฆ filming them with their iPhones is perhaps an easy layup, but Iโ€™m an easy lay. Sorry! (Didnโ€™t these people see the Texas Chainsaw 3D reshoots? iPhones canโ€™t stop Leatherface!)

I still donโ€™t love that Leatherface is wearing someoneโ€™s sopping wet face. Would you put on a wet t-shirt fresh from the laundry? Leatherface is many things, but heโ€™s always struck me as practical.

There you have it! Will โ€œTry anything and youโ€™re canceled, broโ€ join the hallowed Chainsaw sequel lexicon next to โ€œDo your thing, cuzโ€? Stranger things have happened.

Iโ€™ll be in front of my TV at midnight when Texas Chainsaw Massacre hits Netflix on February 18th.