10 Films That Should Never Have Become Franchises
8. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
As blackly comic as Night Of The Living Dead was subversive, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (the onscreen title) is a virtual textbook on how to make a claustrophobic, trend-setting genre piece with modest resources. Sensational but unforgettable, violent but not gory and unrestrained but never overblown, Chain Saw should be screened for every wannabe horror filmmaker as an example of how to get it right.
Aside from Tobe Hooper’s own Chainsaw 2, the most interesting aspect of the sequels is the casting. Viggo Mortensen appears in Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, Renee Zellwegger and Matthew McConaughey are in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation and Jessica Biel turns up in the remake. Other than that, each new movie was slung together by clods who couldn’t direct traffic.
Released in 2017, Leatherface is the seventh film spun off from Hooper’s original, the second to be titled Leatherface and the second that purports to be a prequel, which ought to answer the question of whether it adds anything of note to the franchise. Unlike The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, though, it’s a prequel to Hooper’s original.