Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990)

There's a version of this film that could've worked. Take a pre-fame Viggo Mortensen, stick him in the Texas dust as a feral, grinning maniac, hand him a chainsaw franchise with genuine nastiness baked into its DNA, and you've got at least the bones of something. Instead, Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III wastes every single one of those ingredients and ends up as one of the more dispiriting horror sequels I've sat through.

Mortensen is clearly trying. That's almost the saddest part. He goes full throttle: wild eyes, spit flying, the whole unhinged hitchhiker routine cranked to eleven. But trying too hard is its own kind of wooden, and without a script or a director giving him anything to bounce off, it just reads as embarrassing. You watch him and think of what he'd go on to do, and the contrast is almost funny.

The problems run deeper than the casting, though. The lighting is a genuine disaster: scene after scene is either pitch black or blown out into a washed-out grey haze, and not in any way that feels intentional or atmospheric. It's just incompetent. The cinematography offers nothing, the kills are repetitive and oddly bloodless in terms of impact despite the gore on screen, and the dialogue is the kind of stuff that makes you wince every time someone opens their mouth. Horror films can survive bad dialogue if they've got tension. This one hasn't got tension. It's got lurching pacing, forgettable leads, and a plot so thin you can see through it.

Compare any of this to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and it's genuinely depressing. Tobe Hooper's original is a film built on dread, on texture, on the horrible feeling that something is deeply, fundamentally wrong with the world you've wandered into. It's grimy in a way that gets under your skin. This sequel is grimy in the way that a motorway services toilet is grimy: just unpleasant, nothing more.

The "dinner table" scene, clearly designed to echo one of horror's most iconic sequences, is a good example of the whole film's failure. It reaches for disturbing and lands on silly. R.A. Mihailoff under the mask doesn't help. Leatherface works best when there's something uncanny about him, some eerie, lumbering stillness that makes him feel like a force rather than a bloke in a mask. Here he's just loud and big and dull. The menace is completely absent.

I'll give it this: it's only 81 minutes long. The pain is mercifully brief. And yes, there's gore, plenty of it, if that's what you're turning up for. But gore without dread is just special effects. There's no build-up, no character worth caring about, and no atmosphere to speak of. You can almost, almost admire the commitment to pure sleaze. Almost. Admiration doesn't make it good.

Two stars. A low point in the franchise, and one that's style-free, soulless, and gone from your memory almost before the credits roll. Save yourself the evening.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 1990  | Watched: 2025-09-21

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