Leatherface

What did Lili Taylor get herself into? With uninteresting young actors and a healthy dose of cheapness and inanity, Leatherface is a variation on the “origin story” that adds nothing to the series. (26.11.2017)

Everything you didn’t want to know about the young Leatherface, but Bustillo and Maury have asked on your behalf. I really can’t understand why a talented duo of directors who generated a lot of buzz after their début thought it would be a good idea to take on this languishing series, and why they’ve contributed to it in this way. Their Leatherface is unleashed enough to deviate from many other similar but better films. However, unlike the previous TCM from 2013, this one does have some standards of craftsmanship, something that could be called an atmosphere and it’s not drowning in all out madness; that’s enough for an average. (08.10.2017)

Don´t mess with the Family!! The feeling when you come home from work and the first thing you do is look at what came out today and see a big Leatherface, the smile that comes across your face at a movie you've been waiting a year for is indescribable. I'm very happy that this prequel was given to the duo of Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, two excellent French butchers who made the gem Inside and two decent horror films: Livid and Among the Living. Leatherface, their best effort after Inside, has a very dirty look right from the start, it really feels like it was made in the 1960s, and I have a huge soft spot for old Texas. The film serves up a hefty dose of honest to goodness gore from start to finish and it's a hell of a lot of fun to watch – nothing more brutal has definitely come out this year. Sex on a corpse or being eaten alive by pigs, you just don't see that kind of stuff. The sheriff who goes by his own rules, the beautiful Lili Taylor, the thick atmosphere with a great soundtrack, well I'm very satisfied. Nexst Leatherface, ghost and demons feel like a children's colouring book. The local hopelessness, the filth and the psychopathic Sawyer family makes the film a very intense experience. The passage through the woods at night, the screams of a woman running away and the sound of a chainsaw is an indescribable atmosphere! Those who can enjoy like this should not hesitate, they will not regret it. The rest will grumble. 80%. (22.09.2017)

For me, the original Massacre Is one of the most suggestive cinematic experiences ever – a sickeningly consistent build-up of fear and a nerve-wracking immersion in the setting and mood of evil incarnate. The sequels are more or less watchable rubbish, and Leatherface is, as expected, no exception. The story is patched together clumsily from three distinct parts whose transitions are reprehensibly rushed, it drags in protagonists without knowing what to do with them and has them quickly dispatched, and the development of the most important character is shrunk quite incomprehensibly to one or two scenes. At least it has a solid drive, a pretty woman in the lead role, and some satisfyingly disgusting scenes around which a passable atmosphere is built. But it's still simply a denigration of a brilliant original that no one needed to see. Period. (16.01.2018)

Leatherface doesn't have the rawness of the original 1974 film, which I don't think is even possible to achieve with current technology, because the rawness was also due to the picture and its imperfections. Still, Leatherface works quite well as an origin film, and one can believe that this is the birth of a familiar villain that is believable and even makes quite a bit of sense. More cow-head scenes are needed. (02.02.2018)