On Feb. 18, Netflix released a new movie to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series, directed by David Garcia. The movie showcases Leatherface after 50 years of being sheltered in a small remote town in Harlow, Texas, where a group of young idealistic adults come to renew the small town while unknowingly disrupting Leatherface’s peace. 

The movie starts off with a group of 4 young adults coming to Harlow to rebuild the small town into their own entrepreneur utopia, but they come into a bit of conflict with the owner of the local orphanage. After a bit of back and forth, the lady gets a heart attack and needs to get rushed to a hospital. One of the friends from the main cast, two police officers and Leatherface gather up in the police van to transport the lady to a hospital. The lady passes away in the car, which triggers Leatherface to gruesomely kill one of the cops, which causes a chain reaction for the cop who was driving to get shot.

At this point the movie starts to show off its way of keeping the viewers on their toes. The movie is filled with these intense scenes where they keep you in anticipation, then fake you out with a moment of relief until the jumpscare finally shows. 

The second half of the movie becomes your everyday slasher film with little logic, Leatherface gets shot more than humanly possible to live from and somehow survives other injuries that make you question his mortality.

 In the last couple minutes of the movie, we have the last two characters from the main cast trying whatever they can to evade Leatherface and take him down, which leads to a climactic finish of someone using Leatherface’s own weapon to take him down. In the final minutes of the movie, we’re greeted with Leatherface basically coming back from the dead to kill off one of the characters, then it cuts to him walking to a small house in the middle of nowhere, which may or may not be the producers own way to tell the viewers “There’s more to come”.

When I was first watching the movie, I had to pause the movie to properly digest the sudden things that occurred. Besides the massive amount of shock and the questions I had for some of the choices made in the movie, I think it was a pretty decent movie to watch if you just want to see a horror classic in the modern era. The movie does not rely too hard on events in past movies but it still has enough details to make it a bit more interesting for people who are familiar with the Texas chainsaw events. All in all, I think the movie is a nice, casual, scary watch for all sorts of horror movie enjoyers.