LEATHERFACE (2017)

  

(Directors: Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury. Screenwriter: Seth M. Sherwood, his script based on characters created by Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper.)

 

Review

LEATHERFACE, a prequel to THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974) and TEXAS CHAINSAW 3D (2013), opens in 1955 on the Sawyer farm (established in 1845, according to its arched gateway). The murderous family chooses the wrong victim when they lure a young woman (Betty Hartman) onto their farm and kill her. Her date, Ted Hardesty (future father of Sally and Franklin Hardesty, siblings seen in the 1974 film), calls the cops who immediately respond. Not only are the Sawyers known to the police as probable killers (something the cops can’t prove), but Betty is Sheriff Hal Hartman’s adolescent daughter.

Hal Hartman (Stephen Dorff, BLADE, 1998) and his fellow law enforcement brethren find Betty’s body but can’t prove the Sawyers killed her. Raging and grieving, Hal declares Sawyer matriarch Verna to be an unfit mother and takes her tween son (Jedidiah, “Jed”) into “protective custody.”

A decade later, Jed, renamed “Bud” by the authorities for his protection, is a ward of the ECT-brutal Gorman House Youth Reformatory. Jed is a hulking simpleton, whose only ward friends are Jackson (Sam Strike), a good-hearted and emotional young man, and Elizabeth “Lizzy” White, a pretty, sympathetic nurse.

Verna Sawyer─newly surnamed Carson through marriage─shows up with her lawyer (Farnsworth) and demands to see Jed. When Dr. Lang (Christopher Adamson, RAZOR BLADE SMILE, 1998) refuses, citing Jed’s safety, Verna tries to free Jed, who escapes without her. A violent, occasionally gory series of events follows, including a wild road trip for young Jed and his fellow escapees (psychopathic Ike and pyromaniac Clarice, who’ve kidnapped Jackson and Elizabeth) while the cops, led by tough-as-nails Sheriff Hartman, pursue them.

The underrated LEATHERFACE is tonally and continuity-true to the events of TEXAS (1974) and TEXAS 3D (2013), from its grimy, sepia-edged cinematography (the work of Antoine Sanier) to its soundtrack, to the Sawyer house, a faithful copy of their home from the original film (credit production designer Alain Bainée). Seth M. Sherwood’s screenplay and Sébastien de Sainte Croix and Josh Ethier’s editing strike a deft, Terence Malick-esque balance between TEXAS’s underlying horrors and the relative, initial innocence of its traumatized characters─this is a bit of departure for a TEXAS flick, as the rest of the films are more about traditional-horror thrills and kills. Not that LEATHERFACE completely ignores or de-legitimizes the remaining five TEXAS films─it doesn’t, and acknowledges them, e.g., by making Jed’s family surname “Sawyer,” a detail that originally appeared in THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 (1986).

Its cast is equally standout. Among them: Lili Taylor (THE ADDICTION, 1995), who played Verna Sawyer/Carson with memorable, maternal intensity; Sam Strike (CHERNOBYL, 2019), who played Jed’s good-hearted, heroic fellow inmate with convincing sincerity, anger, and doubt.

While its story is not groundbreaking, LEATHERFACE’s eschewing of non-stop terror and gore for occasionally bloody drama and character-exploration is a frame-busting flick in a series that too often has fallen into familiar-with-little-variation trappings─it’s worth seeing if you’re watching it for good acting, miasmic mood, downward-spiraling characters, and identity-themed drama.