YMMV / Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)

• Ass Pull: While horror movies are no strangers to the villains turning out to be alive at the end, this movie goes to pretty ludicrous extremes by having Leatherface somehow survive getting slashed in the throat by his own chainsaw, then submerged in a pool of water while in an incapacitated state.
  • It gets even more frustrating when you remember that this is supposed to a direct sequel to the original film. In that film Leatherface is briefly incapacitated by a wrench being thrown at his head, implying he's at the same rough durability of a normal human.. And now Leatherface, who is easily over 70 years old at this point, can take a shotgun blast full to the chest and just keep coming.
• Awesome Music: Colin Stetson's soundtrack doubles as this and Nightmare Fuel with a mix of dark ambience and industrial in the vein of the soundtrack of the original film, but with its own modern influences.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Leatherface's massacre on the bus is meant to resemble a mass shooting. Lila is already shown to have survived an actual mass shooting, meaning she's been victimized by two separate spree killers in her life. On February 13, 2023, there was a school shooting at Michigan State University, with one of the surviving students being 21-year-old Jackie Matthews. She made headlines because she's also a survivor of Sandy Hook, making Lila's situation ominously prophetic.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: One of the criticisms about the film is that it continues to splinter the timeline and goes in the unoriginal direction of making a direct sequel to the original, just like Texas Chainsaw 3D. Even worse, a lot of critics and some fans have pointed out that nobody (besides Sally) is even worth rooting for, making the very same mistake that that film did. And on top of attempting to make Leatherface just as important to Sally's life as Michael Myers was to Laurie Strode (even though Leatherface was just one of an entire family that killed her friends and terrorised her), many have argued that Sally's inclusion is very obviously a retread from the usage of Laurie Strode in Halloween (2018) (a much poorer one for that matter due to both presentation and the fact that they couldn’t use the original actress unlike that film).
• Just Here for Godzilla: As listed below, the bus scene. Some people have gone out of their way to watch the film just to get to that scene and witness all of the chainsaw goriness.
• Memetic Mutation: "Try anything and you're cancelled, bro." ^Explanation An absolutely ridiculous line from one of the people on a bus holding up their phones and livestreaming Leatherface in order to keep him at bay with the threat of cancellation. Given he's a clear maniac with a chainsaw wearing a mask that would prevent identification either doesn't know or care what being cancelled means makes what happens next predictable and grimly hilarious.
• Narm:
  • The infamous "cancelled" line is either this or Narm Charm.
  • Leatherface's ridiculous feats in the film are so impossible for an elderly human killer that it's unintentionally hilarious. He displays outright superhuman stats by holding someone with a revved up chainsaw one-handed, and in the end, he's still alive after being repeatedly stabbed and shot and having his throat slit with his own chainsaw.
  • Sally being alive enough to save the main characters from Leatherface after having a chainsaw rammed through her chest.
• Nightmare Fuel: Leatherface delivers, as usual. Some highlights:
  • In the first trip into the town, Dante goes to take down a confederate flag up in a seemingly abandoned building. He's in the middle of the brightly lit scene as he does this, but both the left and right sides of the scene are near pitch black. If you look closely, on the left side of the screen, you can see a large, old man with an angry expression on his face sitting off to the side, in the dark. This is our first look at old man Leatherface and you might not even see it.
  • The completely uncensored shot of Mrs. Mc's flayed face when Sally finds her corpse. The sight is so awful that Sally, even after all her preparation for this moment, is reduced to stammering horror. Granted, Leatherface only did this to his mom's body after her natural death, but Sally has no way to know that.
  • In addition to the above, the flaying itself. While we don't explicitly see it being done, we can hear him hacking away at her face just offscreen, with the defenseless and bloodied Ruth barley able to see him in the rear view mirror. Then her and the audience see him lifting up a skinned face that he then puts on like a mask. What follows is minutes of Nothing Is Scarier tension as he skulks around the crashed van, Ruth almost never able to see him, but able to hear his labored breathing.
  • The mask Leatherface wears is nothing but this. While previous TCM movies show his masks as either neat and tidy, or at least strung together and made to look scary, this Leatherface wears what looks like drooping skin that's hanging on by threads, only his greasy, long hair sticking out. This is probably because, unlike most of his other masks, this one is fresh.
  • The crawlspace sequence, where Melody is hiding from Leatherface underneath his home, only for him to start sawing through the floorboards while Melody frantically tries to crawl to safety.
  • The bus massacre. Leatherface marches aboard the bus and relentlessly cuts his way through dozens of panicking victims, leaving the whole bus covered floor to ceiling with blood, limbs, and entrails. The scene is clearly meant to remind viewers of a mass shooting, with the survivors hiding in a bathroom, the crowd growing ever smaller and denser in their blind panic, and Leatherface jabbing and swiping at fallen victims to make absolutely sure that they're dead.
  • Colin Stetson's soundtrack. It's a haunting, dissonant soundscape that mixes Stetson's signature rugged horns with an industrial soundscape of scraping metal, piercing shrieks and metallic grumbles.
• Rooting for the Empire: Many people who saw the film rooted for Leatherface because the protagonists were so unlikable.
• Signature Scene: Chances are, if people are talking about this movie, someone will bring up the bus scene, for the "cancelled" line and/or the sheer volume of gore it delivers on shortly afterwards.
• So Bad, It's Good: Most fans are fully aware of the movie's many flaws and its poor attempts at creating Developing Doomed Characters. Nevertheless, some fans still enjoy the movie anyway because it is by far the goriest entry in the franchise, and because the film wastes little time getting to all the bloody carnage.
• Squick: Not including the various bloody deaths, there's a moment in the film where Melody is in a crawlspace crawling away from Leatherface's chainsaw, which suddenly slices through a sewer pipe. She is immediately drenched in globs of excrement and sludge.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: A common complaint is that, between the lack of any likable characters, and Leatherface's newfound invincibility, there's no tension or interest in the story, just a few gory kills.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Sally Hardesty gets very little to do in this film despite her prominence in the marketing. In fact, as soon as she enters the main events of the film, she only offers a few short, anticlimactic scenes of facing off against Leatherface before getting slaughtered.
  • Richter. Despite his mannerisms, he's actually a Jerk with a Heart of Gold and one of the smartest characters in the film. The second he finds Dante's mutilated body, he immediately tries to save him (despite trading blows with him earlier), tells Catherine to call the cops, and tries to save Melody. Richter is also the only character besides the cops and Sally smart enough to arm himself while Leatherface is on the loose. Frustratingly, he's dispatched by Leatherface just when it seemed like he'd become more integral to the plot, and right when it seemed like he'd join Melody and Lila in helping them escape town.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: A common criticism of the movie is that few, if any, of the main characters are particularly likable. Many reviewers commented that they simply did not care enough about the protagonists to be invested in their survival. Lila and Richter are two of the only ones that actually are likable to most people.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Leatherface can appear as this to some, not only due to the protagonists being irritatingly annoying, but ironically with his entire motive of seeking revenge on the influencers he holds responsible for his mother's death. He kills them and those who help them, but seems uninterested in hurting anyone else. The scene where he cradles and smells his deceased mother's dress in grief is pretty heart touching and brings out the empathy in some people.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Melody's death is supposed to be sad, as she expresses remorse for inadvertently causing Leatherface's mother to die of a stress induced heart attack. Thing is, her remorse does not change the fact she got someone killed, and many audiences felt that her remorse was not enough to redeem her character. Several critics and fans felt nothing but indifference or outright joy when Leatherface eventually butchers her.
• The Woobie: Lila is the most innocent of the group and the most sympathetic on account of dealing with the trauma from surviving a school shooting, only to run into another Spree Killer. Even worse, right when it seems like she's finally overcome her personal demons, the movie ends with Lila witnessing her sister's decapitation while she's helpless to do anything about it.