Written by Chris Thomas Devlin
Directed by David Blue Garcia
Starring Sarah Yarkin, Elsie Fisher, Nell Hudson, Moe Dunford, Jacob Latimore, Jessica Allain, Alice Krige, William Hope, Owen Fouere and Mark Burnham as Leatherface
Plot: after several decades, Leatherface returns to terrorize a group of influencers invading his town
Going in to this I figured it had the potential to be very divisive and it didn’t disappoint, well actually that depends on which one of us you ask. Let’s get all the thing we agreed on out of the way. We liked that this one wasn’t the whole town trying to murder them and we agreed that the cast was good. Phew, now that that’s done, shall we begin the dissent…
We averaged out our scores for each movie in the series and found that my average is a dozen points higher than Taras’. In addition, her score was over ten points below her average while mine was over 10 points above my average. We really didn’t view this movie the same.
I liked the kills and the obvious statement on gentrification while Tara thought it was too “shocking” for its own good. We completely disagreed on the realism. Tara thought it seemed as if a conservative and a liberal got together, took all of their dumbest and stereotypical beliefs, applied a set to each character and made a terrible movie. She thinks it wound up saying nothing.
I on the other hand liked the story and enjoyed the social commentary. I saw the movie take shots at both sides. I have always thought a recurring theme in TCM has been a zealous and/or selfish group of people do whatever they want, whenever they want to whomever they want and that view is not limited to the family but extends to groups of friends and the lynch mobs. I heard this movie say that living in a bubble with like minded people and shitting on other people or just plain not caring about them is wrong and will get you, eventually, one way or another. Us vs them will cost us all a lot. That messaging did lead to mostly unlikable characters which we agreed on.
Our scores tell the tale of two different experiences. Tara gave it a 29 and I like it more every time I really think about it, scored it a 69.
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