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SOURCE-Digital Copy on Vudu
First off thanks to Bat32 of Exploited Cinema and Weird World Publishing for hooking me up with the digital copy code for this film many years ago. I redeemed the code and then didn't bother watching the film for at least 2 years.
Now I love the original TCM film from 1974. And usually I end up enjoying the sequels to that film. Leatherface,and I hate how this has an almost indentical name to the third film in the franchise,is an odd piece of film from this franchise. It serves as a prequel to the original film. And it is in continuity with that film and Texas Chainsaw 3d.
After Texas Chainsaw 3d did fairly well in theaters Lionsgate quickly wanted to make another film. This prequel was supposed to be filmed in Louisiana,lots of films are made there cause the state provides film tv shows lots of tax breaks,and was gonna be an origin story for Leatherface. Instead for various reasons the film was made in Bulgaria. And cause of how long it took to be made the studio lost the rights to make future films in the series.
So how is the movie? Imagine if Natural Born Killers and the original TCM had a kid. But this kid got mostly the bad shit from each parent. After a start where we see Leatherface's family fighting off some people we skip to a mental hospital. Where we know that the teen that will become Leatherface is. All the patients at this hospital are renamed. A young nurse is falling in love with a patient. Leatherface's mother shows up and is denied the right to see her son. She starts a riot and in this a few of the patients escape.
You go the young nurse,who is held hostage. A tall silent hulking guy. Who you look at and think that has to be Leatherface. And Jackson the guy the nurse was falling for. A fairly nice looking dude. Along with others from the hospital they all go on the run.
The cops are after them. And the cops quickly learn that Leatherface is one of the patients that escaped. Of course we are all thinking that Bud,the tall silent guy,is Leatherface. NOPE. There's a twist. Bud dies and Jackson gets a nasty face injury. Which isn't taken proper care of. And boom this is who becomes Leatherface.
Now until this movie I had always been able to see each TCM movie in a theater. Saw the original at a drive in when I was young in the mid 70s. Saw the unrated 2nd film at a theater thanks to one of my favorite uncles. I even saw the horrid part 4 ,sure I had to drive from near Houston TX to Austin to do this. Sadly Leatherface got such a limited theatrical release there was no way I could see it in a theater.
While the gore in this is pretty good,the story is shit. I feels more like a cops chasing the evil killers movie than a TCM film. And if Texas Chainsaw Massacre The Next Generation didn't exist this would be the worst film in the franchise.
From what I can find this film was a huge bomb. And so disliked that it cause the next film in the series,which came out years later,to be another reboot of the series continutity.
Leatherface gets a D-
