Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)

A group of young Austin hipsters have great plans to commit their own version of gentrification on the near ghost town of Harrow in Texas (as we are going to call Bulgaria this week). It’s all the plan of chefs Dante (Jacob Latimore) and Melody (Sarah Yarkin), so they, Dante’s girlfriend – let’s call her Dies-too-early-for-me-to-remember-her-name – and Melody’s sister Lila (Elsie Fisher) are something of the vanguard of the project. They are visiting the town they bought apparently without ever having gone there just hours before a busload of investors is supposed to arrive. As the traumatized survivor of a school shooting, Lila has all the makings of a final girl, of course, for trauma has replaced virginity in contemporary slashers as the Sign of the Final Girl™.

Which will turn out to be useful, for a series of unfortunate events reactivates good old Leatherface (Mark Burnham), who had been living here peacefully with his mother (Alice Krige). And the years clearly have turned the guy into more of a traditional slasher, so Austin hipsters beware.

The filmmakers responsible for TCM ‘22 could have spared themselves a whole load of vitriolic criticism if only they had changed some names, filed off some elements of the script, and called this an homage to “films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”. Given that the film at hand has very little to do with text, subtext, context, style or mood of the original movie, and is rather shit seen as the direct sequel it purports to be, it really wouldn’t have lost out on anything but a marketable name. Without the TCM millstone round its back this could have happily survived as a fun, dumb, gory and pretty silly throwback slasher that superficially tacks on some modern social concerns.

It still is that, mind you, it’s just that much more difficult for many a horror fan to overlook what it purports to be, but is much too dumb to actually manage to be. Fortunately, while I believe the original TCM to be one of the greatest horror movies ever made, I have zero interest in TCM as a franchise, so it is surprisingly easy for me to treat this as the movie it actually is and just ignore the stuff that should never have been in there in the first place.

Seen as a series of dumb, bloody, and fun set pieces following established slasher formula - with some awkward borrowing from the first neo-Halloween thrown in because being derivative seems to be a bit of a way of life for this one – David Blue Garcia’s film is actually a success. There is many a fun and highly unlikely chainsaw kill, including what is certainly the best bus chainsaw massacre ever put to film (seriously, the scene is pretty incredible), excellent suspense sequences, and character writing so bad (screenplay credit goes to Chris Thomas Devlin) it does tend to be rather funny, particularly with a – perfectly decent - cast who treat this nonsense as earnestly as possible. It is all shot and edited with improbable gloss and care, suggesting Garcia could direct the hell out of a proper script, but is perfectly willing and able to put effort into whatever this thing he’s been hired for is supposed to be.

As something of a bonus, there are also quite a few moody scenes of characters wandering through the very atmospheric empty town lot, which is the sort of thing that’ll always delight me to no end in a horror movie; particularly since it means we don’t have to suffer through another warehouse and corridor walker.

Sleight (2016)

Warning: Spoilers ahead!

Without parents, any visible family, or a decent system of social care – particularly for poor and black people like them - available, young Bo (Jacob Latimore) has to take care of his sister Tina (Storm Reid) all by himself. So he works as a street magician by day, and sells drugs for the seemingly personable – as far as it goes in this business - drug lord Angelo (Dulé Hill) by night. Bo has secrets, though. For one, he does what amounts to actual magic with the help of a home made electromagnet device he has implanted in his arm, like a low key junior gadgeteer superhero. Secondly, and much worse, he is skimming off Angelo’s drugs in an attempt to scratch together to take Tina and leave Los Angeles for somewhere where they can live the life of normal people. That’s particularly unfortunate since Angelo would really rather pull Bo deeper into the Life, doing his best to involve him in more than just dealing, and so has a rather more careful eye on him.

So, at about the same time as Bo’s life changes for the better when he meets and falls in – reciprocated – love with Holly (Seychelle Gabriel), a young woman who we will later learn to have a high tolerance for pretty shitty secrets in her boyfriend, thanks to the difficulties in her own life, things with Angelo start to unravel. Soon, Tina’s and Holly’s lives are threatened, and Bo’s only way out might be to turn his invention for letting coins float into a weapon.

So yes, and obviously, J.D. Dillard’s Sleight can very easily be read as a low key superhero origin story, just one that concentrates on the kinds of people contemporary big budget superhero films still tend to ignore or short-change. This is a film about black, poor people who feel forced to do some pretty shitty things to survive; indeed, some viewers might find Bo “unsympathetic”. He sure as hell does a lot of morally inexcusable things, but like any good film about someone seeking some form of (in this case non-mystical) transcendence, Sleight needs to show what their protagonist has to transcend. And that he does indeed manage to transcend a situation resonant with the way many people actually have to live in one way or the other rather seems to be the film’s core concern to me, a very classical use of the fantastic as a means as well as a symbol for the wish to change and to escape.

As for me, I can’t say I actually ever found Bo unlikeable or unrelatable, but then, there but for the grace of mere chance go I, or really, everyone, so who am I to judge? It does of course help that Latimore’s performance is as warm as it is conflicted, portraying Bo as a guy who thinks he does the best he can in his situation, and who is in the end willing to risk himself for others, and achieving actual change for others and himself in the end.


Formally, Sleight as an entry into the growing number of US films of the fantastic by black directors is very much a contemporary indie (the sort with a budget, but not riches) movie. It is carefully staged, deliberately paced, with a sometimes carefully hidden sense of poetry next to a much more obvious idea of realism, demonstrating a willingness to work with genre elements in ways that’ll annoy some viewers because it makes so little of a thing of them, but which delight me because their use feels so personal and individual and through this, actually meaningful.