We Interrupt This Broadcast for a Special Announcement...

 

Hey, hey, Horror Nuts!  Welcome to another edition of WTFHM!

So, this week was supposed to wrap out the Black History Month/Chinese New Year edition of WTFHM and, to my credit, I did attempt to watch Midnight Melody as promised. But, I ran into a few problems.

Okay, not that many, but they still were enough to keep me from watching the movie. 

For one thing, as it turns out Midnight Melody is my first low-budget A-Horror movie...well, the first one in a long time anyway. As you might know, if you've been following this blog for a while, B-movies of all kinds are welcome at my table.

But I mention the low quality for a reason. See, this movie was available in only two places: Tubi and Amazon Prime for 3.99. Again, not a dealbreaker for me either way, but, I'm getting to it.

So, I find the movie on Tubi and start watching it and I notice that not only is this a low-budget flick, it's pretty bad. At least I think it is. As it happens, Tubi must use Google Translate for their subtitling because I could barely follow what was going on.

And then the subtitles broke altogether halfway through, so, yeah.

I had the choice between paying 3 dollars to watch it on Amazon Prime or just review another movie. So...

This week's movie!

Texas Chainsaw Massacre starring Sarah Yarkin, Elsie Fisher, Mark Burnham, Jacob Latimore, Moe Dunford, Olwen Fouere, Jessica Allain, Nell Hudson, Alice Krige, and William Hope.

Oh, and the dude from Night Court narrated the beginning. John Larroquette. This guy:

(Fun fact!  He was the narrator in the original movie!)

Okay, so before we get into the synopsis, allow me to remind you guys that I am not a fan of reboots/remakes/reimagines in general, but I have been proven wrong about a lot of them so I'm usually willing to give them a chance...particularly with this one. I'm saying, the trailer was all the way live.

So, yeah, I felt more obligated than anything to check this one out and...well...let's get on with it.

Once upon a time a bunch of hipsters in a van decide they want to renovate a ghost town so that they can have their own little hipster city in which to live their own peaceful hipster lives. 

And really, say what you want about hipsters, I'm not mad at it. Fundamentally, nothing wrong with wanting to build your happy place.

The problem comes when they discover an old woman and her son are still living in one of the houses. They call the police and drag the woman out. The woman has a heart attack and dies and her son decides to seek revenge and THAT, folks, is what happens when you're like "Leatherface needs a better backstory!"

My face once I realized where they were going with this:

Anyway, this is a slasher movie, so let's do a round of Blood, Boobs, Body Count, and Bad Acting.

1. Blood -- A+

There were buckets and buckets of blood in this one. Like every slasher film worth their salt, there were practically oceans of blood flowing through this movie.  The gore was top tier and all things considered, I'm here for it.

2. Boobs -- F+

This is 2022 people. We don't do gratuitous nudity in horror very much anymore.  That's right. Not a tit in sight in this one. To be fair, I don't think there were any tits in the original either, so there's that.

3. Body Count -- A+

So, IMDB puts the body count at 16, but there had to be more in my opinion. At one point, Leatherface takes out a literal busload of people, so...yeah. 

That scene had the best moment in the whole movie, though:

If there is some kind of commentary happening in this movie, it was lost on me...except for that part.

4. Bad Acting -- D-

I mean, no oscar winners in this cast or anything, but they didn't do half bad in terms of acting. I wasn't really expecting much, though. I think I'd have been fine with terrible acting.

So, the big, big question is that is this a reboot/remake/reimagining that I can get with.  The answer is...

I'm not gonna raspberry it, though. Clearly, somebody involved in making this movie had enough horror movie chops to pull off some really great scenes, but the vision of the original point of this franchise was just lost.

I realize I'm starting to sound like one of those gatekeeping purists, but hear me out. The reason why the original is a classic is that nobody made a horror movie quite like it before that. It was innovated for about a dozen different reasons. Horror nuts in the movie-making industry still cite it as an influence for their work.

So that being said, no. Not gonna give it a jewel. To be honest, I don't even want to give it a pink jewel, but here we are:

Next week's movie!  The Privilege! A Netflix horror movie.  Let's see how good it is!  See you next week!

O~

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