Every Texas Chainsaw Massacre Movie Ranked Worst To Best
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, from the outright worst to the undeniable best.
With the release of Gun Interactive and Sumo Nottingham's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre video game, the beloved Leatherface-fronted franchise has found itself back in the spotlight in a major way - whether that's with long-standing TCM fans or those largely unfamiliar with the IP prior to this gaming release.
While the game itself is winning plentiful plaudits from fans and critics alike, the Texas Chainsaw movies are more of a mixed bag. Of course, those movies began way back in 1974 with Tobe Hooper's iconic Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which not only changed the face of horror, but changed the face of cinema, period.
Hooper's movie is the main inspiration for Gun and Sumo's video game, yet the film series has offered up a further eight pictures since poor Sally Hardesty and her pals were first terrorised by the Sawyer family back in '74. Some of those pictures are great, some of those pictures are passable, and some of those pictures are absolute stinkers.
Looking back across the nine Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies to date - three of which essentially share the same title - here they're ranked from the outright worst to the undeniable best.
9. Leatherface
When the TCM franchise is bad, it's awful. And of the worst films to be served up by this series, it's hard to look past 2017's Leatherface as being the biggest turd of the bunch.
For some legendary horror characters, often less is more when it comes to backstory. Part of the appeal of these figures stems from the mystique behind them, and in the case of Leatherface, the first Texas Chain Saw Massacre was so great due to how you knew nothing about the Sawyer family, how you didn't know how long they'd been carrying out such brutality.
So, having already dug into Leatherface's past with 2006's Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, the past was again revisited with this 2017 picture; a picture which serves as a prequel to the original movie and 2013's Texas Chainsaw 3D.
This prequel opens up with a young Thomas Sawyer luring a couple to their death at the hands of his family. Locked up in the Gorman House Youth Reformery for his role in this, Thomas has his name changed as the action jumps ahead ten years. From here, there's a whodunit element to Leatherface, as the audience is left to decipher which of the troubled youths who escape this facility is indeed really Tommy Sawyer.
Unfortunately, any horror fan worth their salt could immediately tell who was the real Leatherface-in-waiting, and not even a valiant turn from genre fave Lili Taylor could stop from this being utter trash.