Remember all those other sequels to (and remakes of) 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which Texas Monthly‘s panel named one of “The Ten Greatest Texas Films of All Time” (“No Country for Bad Movies,” June 2011) last year?
They no longer exist. At least, that’s the cinematic conceit of Texas Chainsaw 3D, the latest showcase for Leatherface and family, which “reboots” the series to take place directly after Tobe Hooper’s original (though still some decades later).
The IMDB synopsis for director John Luessenhop’s (Takers, Lockdown) movie, which comes out the first week of 2013: “A young woman travels to Texas to collect an inheritance; little does she know that an encounter with a chainsaw-yielding killer is part of the reward.”
You can watch the newly released trailer above. (NSFW warning: it contains attractive, scantily clad young women in jeopardy.)
“Does the lack of the word “Massacre” in the freshly truncated title of Texas Chainsaw 3D indicate that this sequel to Tobe Hooper’s classic 1974 horror film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre will find Leatherface settling his problems through the power of rhetoric?,” Clark Collis of Entertainment Weekly wisecracked.
“It’s your boilerplate, half-baked sequel, side-quel whatever who cares,” wrote Kevin Jagernauth of Indiewire, in a post headlined “‘Texas Chainsaw 3D’ Trailer Carves Up More Mediocrity.”
The new movie was filmed in Shreveport, Louisiana. Sorry, Kingsland, but the tax incentives! And while original screenwriter Kim Henkel and original Leatherface actor Gunnar Hanson are in the credits, that is only due to their involvement in the first film (they are credited with “characters” and “archival footage,” respectively).
However, “scream queen” actress Marilyn Burns, who played Sally Hardesty in the first film, has a role in this one.
For more Chainsaw, read John Bloom’s classic Texas Monthly story about the making of the original film on the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary (“They Came. They Sawed,” November, 2004).
