a review of 德州电锯杀人狂

2022 PODCAST MACABRE HORROR CHALLENGE #46: A REMAKE/REBOOT I didn't outright hate this, and for about the first 45 minutes I was legitimately entertained, only to find my enjoyment decreasing the longer it went. I couldn't really tell what the movie was trying to say about gun violence other than it being the current go-to traumatic backstory for characters in horror movies. A lot of the 2020s influencer culture references felt more like middle aged filmmakers rolling their eyes at the kids these days instead of something grounding it in the present day. I liked that Elsie Fisher and Sarah Yarkin (two actors I really liked in past movies, Eighth Grade and Happy Death Day 2U, respectively) get to stay alive and go for the full horror triathlon for most (if not all) of the running time. There's also some pretty great gore effects that almost make up for not being as clever as the mind's eye editing and camera work of the original, and a couple of sequences that feel well constructed as horror set pieces. That said, the movie completely fell apart for me in its treatment of Sally Hardesty as yet another in the long line of former final girls turned into thinly imagined imitations of Sarah Connor from the Terminator franchise. I wish this movie actually had something to say about how Sally's trauma affected her life, instead of simply turning her into a quickly dispatched plot device.