Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) is the cinematic equivalent of someone saying, “We’re doing a respectful legacy sequel,” and then immediately tripping face-first into a pit of TikTok trends and chainsaw fuel. It’s positioned as a direct follow-up to the 1974 classic, set fifty years later, but it feels less like a horror film and more like a content algorithm trying to cosplay as one.
If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you fed “Texas,” “trauma,” “Gen Z,” “cancel culture,” and “chainsaw bus massacre” into an AI and told it to write a movie in 90 minutes or less—congratulations, this is that timeline.
Gentrifiers vs. Gerontic Slasher
The plot, such as it is: Melody and Dante, two young “entrepreneurs” from San Francisco, roll into the abandoned Texas town of Harlow with Melody’s sister Lila and Dante’s girlfriend Ruth. Their brilliant idea? Buy up old properties and turn the ghost town into a trendy, heavily gentrified haven for investors and brunch people.
Nothing screams “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” like a WeWork-themed ghost town.
While doing their property tour, they find an old orphanage still inhabited by Ginny, an elderly woman who insists she still owns the place and actually has the papers to prove it. Melody and Dante, being insufferable in the way only fictional coastal gentrifiers can be, effectively pressure her out. Then she has a heart attack, gets hauled into an ambulance with the large, silent man from upstairs, and dies en route.
That man, in case the movie’s subtlety hasn’t already knocked you out, is Leatherface. And congratulations, the “heroes” of our story just wrongfully evicted his surrogate mom to death.
The film seems weirdly proud of this setup, as if “what if leatherface is the emotional center and the gentrifiers kind of deserve it” is an edgy twist, instead of just deeply confusing tone management.
Leatherface vs. Ambulance Physics
Once Ginny dies, Leatherface flips the switch from “quiet large man” to “aging chainsaw icon.” In the ambulance, he murders the cops, causes a crash, and then cuts off Ginny’s face to wear as a mask. It’s supposed to be chilling. It mostly raises the question: how is this guy, who has to be somewhere in his 70s, still moving like he’s in his murderous prime?
The movie has no interest in explaining his survival across five decades. No cult, no supernatural explanation, no backstory. He’s just… still here. Still big. Still fast. Still has unlimited shoulder mobility despite decades of heavy lifting and murder-swinging. Honestly the most unrealistic part of this slasher is Leatherface’s joint health.
Ruth, still alive after the crash, witnesses the face-removal and tries to radio for help, but Leatherface kills her too. This should be a tense, suffocating sequence. Instead it plays like a speedrun: “Ambulance, kill, mask, move on.”
The Bus Scene: Peak Clown Show
Back in Harlow, Melody and Dante are trying to play real estate mogul while investors and buyers arrive on a bus. Lila befriends Richter, a local contractor with a gun, a truck, and just enough personality to remind you that a better movie could probably be built around him.
When the truth about Ginny’s eviction comes out—papers are found, oops, you did illegally kick an old woman out of her house—Melody and Dante realize they might be the villains. You’d think this would become a thematic thread. Instead it’s just an excuse for some guilt before they get slaughtered.
Leatherface returns to town, kills Dante in the orphanage, then moves on to Richter (who at least gets a halfway decent fight scene before being turned into ground beef). The keys to escape end up on Richter’s corpse, naturally, because car keys in horror films are basically cursed objects.
Soon enough, Leatherface climbs onto the bus, where all the investors have gathered and are trapped by the sudden thunderstorm. He steps in, revs his chainsaw, and the crowd responds like the internet wrote them:
One guy raises his phone and warns, “Try anything and you’re canceled, bro.”
And that’s the moment Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) fully transforms into parody. Not clever satire. Just a “How do you do, fellow kids?” moment with gore.
Leatherface then absolutely annihilates everyone on the bus in a CGI-heavy gorefest that’s meant to be shocking but mostly feels like a music video for “Murder at the Influencer Retreat.” It’s flashy, loud, and weirdly weightless. We don’t know these people, we don’t care, and the scene’s main function is to provide trailer material.
Sally Hardesty, Now Featuring Trauma Mileage
Enter Sally Hardesty. The lone survivor of the original 1973 massacre, now a Texas Ranger, grizzled, armed, and so readyfor her Laurie Strode moment. This was clearly intended as the film’s big emotional anchor: the return of a legacy character to confront the monster who ruined her life.
Except the movie has absolutely no idea what to do with her.
She shows up, gets a call that Leatherface is back, and barrels into Harlow like she’s been waiting 50 years for this. She finds Melody and Lila, locks them in a car like misbehaving toddlers, and marches in to confront Leatherface in the orphanage.
She holds him at gunpoint, pours out years of pent-up rage, demands he remember what he did to her and her friends… and he just stares at her. Then walks away.
It could’ve been chilling, if it felt like a comment on how trauma is one-sided: your monster may not remember you, though you never forget them. But the movie doesn’t earn that. It just makes Sally look like she’s been training for the final boss fight in a game where the boss doesn’t even recognize her save file.
Later, Leatherface ambushes and fatally wounds her with her own painfully misused arc. She uses her dying breath to tell Lila not to run, because if she does, he’ll haunt her forever. Which is certainly one way to project your unresolved trauma onto a teenager you met 10 minutes ago.
Final Girl(s), Self-Driving Epilogue
The final act is such a Frankenstein’s patchwork of bad choices it’s almost impressive.
Melody and Lila attempt to escape in Sally’s car, only to crash into a building and get separated. Melody apologizes to Leatherface for Ginny’s eviction—because what this franchise really needed was a “we’re sorry we killed your mom figure” moment with a hulking cannibal wearing her face.
Lila, a school shooting survivor with gun trauma, picks up Sally’s shotgun and goes after Leatherface in a crumbling building. This could be powerful: a victim reclaiming the instrument of her trauma. Instead, it’s handled like a checkbox. She fumbles, panics, gets attacked, and is eventually saved not by her own emotional arc but by Melody swooping in to smack Leatherface with his own chainsaw and knock him into a pool of water.
He sinks. They assume he’s dead. Which is adorable.
The sisters leave in the car—now on self-driving mode, because apparently even in this backwater murder town, Tesla vibes must be honored. As Lila stands through the sunroof, basking in the dawn of trauma, Leatherface pops back up, drags Melody out of the car, and decapitates her in front of her sister. He twirls with the head in classic Leatherface fashion while the self-driving car calmly takes Lila out of town.
It might be the bleakest, stupidest ending in the franchise. It’s not scary or profound; it’s just mean. The movie tries to frame it as a dark, nihilistic gut punch, but by this point it’s burned through so much goodwill and logic that it plays like a cheap “gotcha” layered over a Black Mirror screensaver.
Chainsaw Without a Spine
The saddest thing about Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) is not the gore or the disrespect to legacy characters. It’s that there are actually a few interesting ideas buried under the nonsense: gentrification, survivor guilt, the way trauma festers over decades, rural resentment, generational violence. All of it is briefly poked, then shoved aside so Leatherface can chainsaw-fling intestines at the camera.
The characters are thin stereotypes: sanctimonious gentrifiers, grumpy local, traumatized teen, legacy final girl. The social commentary is half-baked at best, embarrassing at worst. The violence is frequent, sometimes creative, but rarely impactful. And Leatherface himself is more of a mascot than a character—an IP obligation with a chainsaw.
If you’re in the mood for mindless, bloody chaos and don’t care about story, tone, or respect for the original, this might kill 80 minutes. Everyone else will probably walk away thinking the same thing:
They really should’ve just let this franchise stay dead and buried instead of digging it up in Bulgaria and propping it up for one more hollow dance.
