This is a fast, mean, no-apologies slasher that knows exactly what audience it's serving, and it doesn't waste much time getting there once the opening credits end and the young entrepreneurs roll into town looking to gentrify it for social media clout. At a lean 83 minutes, it skips the slow-burn setup a lot of legacy sequels indulge in and gets Leatherface up and swinging his chainsaw quickly, which works firmly in the film's favor even when the character material surrounding him stays fairly thin throughout the entire runtime and rarely deepens beyond the basics.
The film's real emotional spine is Olwen Fouéré's returning survivor, whose presence gives the carnage a genuine thread of history and stakes rather than just supplying fresh victims for the chainsaw to work through one by one across the film's brief, brutal middle stretch. The gore is committed and largely practical in execution, and there's at least one standout set-piece, a busload of confrontation gone violently, spectacularly wrong, that's genuinely memorable and worth the price of admission on its own merits alone, whatever you ultimately make of the rest of the film around it.
Leatherface doesn't need fifty years of mythology, just a chainsaw, a bus, and no mercy.
It won't win over anyone who found this franchise exhausted decades ago, and its attempts at contemporary social commentary land clumsily far more often than they land cleanly or with any real bite behind them. But taken as a quick, brutal, well-shot slasher fix rather than any kind of meaningful continuation of the original's deeper ideas, it delivers exactly what it promises on the tin without wasting your evening or overstaying its welcome in the process, and that alone counts for quite a lot on a lazy Friday night in.
This legacy sequel had a famously turbulent production: directors Ryan and Andy Tohill began shooting in Bulgaria, but Legendary Pictures replaced them with David Blue Garcia after roughly a week of filming, discarding the footage already shot and restarting the production essentially from scratch under a new creative team. The finished film positions itself as a direct continuation of Tobe Hooper's original 1974 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, disregarding the numerous sequels, prequels, and the 2003 remake lineage that came in between, in much the same way the 2018 Halloween did for its own long-running franchise a few years earlier.
Legendary opted to release the film directly on Netflix in February 2022 rather than pursue any theatrical run, and it landed to largely negative reviews, holding around 30% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics overall. Critics were fairly consistent in praising its gore and practical effects work while criticizing its thin characters and heavy-handed attempts at contemporary social commentary throughout the film's brief runtime, which several reviewers felt undercut the tension. Despite the mixed reviews, it became one of Netflix's most-watched titles in its opening weeks, underscoring the franchise's enduring commercial pull even when critical reception continues to lag well behind general audience curiosity and turnout.
