It's going to be horrible just like the last one and the one before that. The first remake back in early 2000's with jessica biel was pretty loyal to the storyline, but aside from that they've been trash since the first two.

I heard the real story behind the Texas chainsaw massacre was about a small town family that would grind people up and put em in chili.

The thing that was always creepy as hell about Leatherface was how he wasn't fully explained. They should have never taken off the mask. I love Rob Zombie but that's something that I thought really sucked about that fool's Halloween remake. I don't want to know about Michael Myers childhood or that kids picked on him. I preferred in the original when they were just like "We don't know why. Dude's just crazy." Screw these wack ass origin stories. 

I'm revisiting this thread because I finally got around to watching this. I'm happy as a goddamn clam with this movie. Once again, based on reviews I've read online I seem to be in the minority here.

Slush Puppy makes the excellent point that people tend to hate the reboot era because of its insistence on showing versus telling regarding the iconic monsters, perhaps complaint number 1 regarding the neigh-militant hatred toward Rob Zombie's Halloween, which I've seen this get compared to.

Leatherface has much more in common with The Devil's Rejects, with all of the grit of that film without the grindhouse pinache. I've also heard more than one person compare it to Natural Born Killers- again without the style- but I'm okay with this. Oddly, the most stylized parts of this movie occur during the violence itself. Movie buffs might find it hackneyed, but as a gorehound I fucking love it. 

The overall story is, in my eyes, epic. It's not immune to horror movie logic fails and frequent visits from the coincidence fairy, but any true blue slasher fan is used to that sort of thing. Compared to the writing in Texas Chainsaw 3D, Leatherface is like fucking Hamlet and that's only a slight exaggeration. The whodunnit?! aspect of the plot largely falls flat, but it also doesn't take away from the film and instigated some good talking points amongst my viewing companions. Lili Taylor kills as Verna Sawyer.

The film also succeeds where TC3D failed in a major way: painting Leatherface as a sympathic character while remaining an absolutely horrific character. Backwoods retard+Chainsaw is horrifying all on its own, and since I don't treat slasher canon like comic book-tier sacred lore, that version of the character will always exist. However, there's something to having something fundamentally good getting broken over the knee, twisted and molded to something irreconcilably evil that is just as terrifying on an existential level. That is Leatherface's greatest achievment. 

tl;dr Leatherface is pretty good you guys.

@cheshyr 

I'm in my early thirties, but I don't see what that has to do with anything. My rudimentary horror education (as it was for so many of those 'of my era') began in the oft-pined for days of VHS Rental joints' cardboard-nightmare wonderland that was the Horror section, late night TV creature features, and HBO's Tales from the Crypt. 

"I've had this conversation with people while playing the "Friday The 13th: The Game" and there is a SERIOUS generation gap in what is now perceived as the "horror/slasher genre"."

Onto semantics. When I say Horror I mean the wide swath of fiction as it relates to anything that is meant to cause feelings of aversion in the viewer. From Camilla to Chthulu to King, from Caligari to The Conjuring and ever onward. I consider Slasher to be any film in the horror subgenre that arose from the post-giallo American film movement roughly from 1980 onward and any evolution of the trappings and tropes established within that ten year period. 'Dead Teenager flicks' as Roger Ebert once disdainfully put it.

Do I consider Leatherface a slasher movie? No, but I don't consider the original as such either. The titular character *is* considered an icon of the Slasher pantheon, so liberal use of the term is neigh unavoidable. Outlaw-road-crime-drama-origin-story-with-slasher-underpinnings is a cumbersome way to put it anyhow. 

http://bloody-disgusting.com/r.....aw-family/

^This article in particular is where I cite the Rob Zombie comparison. It's not indicative of my personal feelings about Leatherface by any means. I'm certainly not the guy who brings all of contemporary horror back to Rob Zombie, not by any stretch. But, to clear the air on ol Rob Zom, my opinion of him is as follows:

Horror as a genre has always been a reflection of the times surrounding it. This is a sermon all its own. House of 1000 Corpses arrived at a time when a film of its kind was sorely needed, before the torture porn boom, when the cinematic landscape was mostly subpar PG13 spookshows and American remakes of superior Japanese horror films. Sure, it's derivative, borrowing a lot of its conceptual backbone from TCM as a matter of fact, but this was during the post-Scream era of Slasher resurgence, where audiences were suffering from meta fatigue and was happy to get back to basics (Freddy v Jason was a doorbuster that year, if memory serves, but I could be wrong about that). From there to Devil's Rejects he at least earned himself a rep enough as a cult genre director to be handed the reigns to a major franchise, even though there was fundamentally nothing in those films that wasn't aped from other iconic grindhouse films. 

Then he slaughtered the sacred cow. I personally had no problem his Halloween- liked it very much, actually. However, I know how to distinguish between a writer/director's version of a character, and the icon of what the character has come to represent to the popular consciousness (and to a lesser extent studios milking the franchise). Carpenter's Shape is not the same as Zombie's Myers (not the same as Alan McElroy's either, but nobody gives a fuck about that). Clive Barker's vision of Pinhead is distinct from how everyone else has treated his mythology outside of a literary setting, and Wes Craven felt that his creation was so abused that he had to give it a proper burial. 

The common thread here is that all of these slasher icons took a sharp turn into cornball territory before ending up with a reboot. Zombie was at a disadvantage from the gate, taking the wheel of an iconic and influential slasher icon and granted studio blessing to make it his own while only recently making a name for yourself as a genre director in your own right. Not an enviable position at all. Hate it or love it, his interpretation of the character was at the very least distinctly *his*, an especially cavalier direction to take in the face of the clinically Hollywood engineering of the Platinum Dunes remakes.

The main difference, to me, is that I consider Carpenter's Halloween to be a genre classic whereas Zombie's is, well, a slasher flick. 

The original Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre both occupy that mantel in my mind. As you so rightly pointed out, TCM achieved notoriety by bloodlessly mindfucking its audience into thinking they saw more than they actually did. Halloween shares in this subtlety, although it achieves its terror in a different way (again another sermon). This phenomena was relatively absent from film for nearly a generation (Psycho notwithstanding), but has existed since the silent era. I think its reemergence through these films juxtaposed against the level of implied violence elevated the perception of TCM in particular to a piece of Mythic Sleaze even amongst people who had not seen it. For better or worse, this became part of the Texas Chainsaw legacy. 

With these classics and their legacy of influence in mind, I can enjoy a reboot or even a crappy sequel, if its fundamentally entertaining. Especially if it makes me see the familiar concepts differently. Leatherface achieves exactly this for me, so its okay in my book. It doesn't dilute or diminish the greatness of the originals, because they can be revisited and appreciated at any time- and nothing ever tops a classic. Treating the characters more like the legends that monsters ought to be, and less like chapters in a book helps. Every generation reimagins, reinterpretes, and sadly, distorts. Besides, compared to what's become of the old Universal Monsters, the contemporary treatment of the 80's greats has been positively reverant. ...although perhaps that should make me worried about the future.

Sorry for the novella. This hit my nerd button hard. I'm interested in your thoughts on this horror generation gap idea, though, and how it relates to the F13 game.