I have never seen the point in most prequels. Horror prequels especially, as you know from the start who lives and who doesn't, but it was decided that we desperately needed to know the origin of Leatherface.
Around 1939, a woman is working the line in a slaughterhouse in rural Texas. She begs the foreman for a break, but he refuses. He then watches her water break and her birth a monstrously ugly baby. He does the only humane thing, i.e. toss the now dead mother and newborn into the meat scrap dumpster.
It's there the baby is found by Luda Mae Hewitt (Allison Marich) who takes his home to raise alongside her son Charlie. Jumping ahead to 1969, and the baby; now named Thomas Hewitt (Andrew Bryniarski) has grown up and found work in the same slaughter house. Or at least he did until the board of health shuts it down.
Thomas doesn't handle this well and murders the owner (Tim De Zarn). This doesn't go unnoticed, however, and Sheriff Hoyt (Lew Temple) decides to run him in. Enlisting Charlie (R. Lee Ermey) to try and talk Thomas down, Charlie figures he'd looked pretty good in a uniform and murders the sheriff.
Brothers Eric (Matt Bomer) and Dean (Taylor Handley), meanwhile, are on a cross country trip with their girlfriends Chrissie (Jordana Brewster) and Bailey (Diora Baird). Eric is enlisted and looking to spend some quality time with his gal and bro before doing his second hitch. Dean, while talking a good game about enlisting and fighting the Commies, actually intends to sit this one out.
Running into biker chick Alex (Cyia Batten) ends with the car totaled and Alex staring them down with a shotgun. Sheriff Hoyt to the rescue! By which he guns Alex down and forces the brothers and Bailey to stuff her now dead body in his car and accompany them. Chrissie was thrown clear in the wreck, but she might have been the luckiest one yet...
Terrible; so many problems I'm not sure where to start. The matter of the sheriff bothers me the most. In the previous film nothing was said, letting us believe Hoyt was either a family member or just someone who worked for the family and used his position to cover up their crimes. Here we get the origin, and why? Sheriffs are an elected position. Wouldn't the other county residents notice Hoyt looked different? If the county had depopulated thanks to the slaughterhouse closing, ok, but then it would just have been absorbed into the counties surrounded it, meaning more people, plus census takers and all the other inspections. Wouldn't the capital notice when Hoyt fails to submit his re-election papers?
Also, Eric is enlisted to report. When he fails to do so, why doesn't the Army investigate? Likewise with Dean. Draft dodging was a fairly serious crime at the time, and unless Hoyt can somehow make it look like they took a different route, someone would drive through.
Hell, at the end when it looks like Chrissie is going to escape and Leatherface kills her, how did he manage to hide the chainsaw in the backseat with him? When she kills a state trooper, wouldn't they notice when he failed to check in? I suppose Hoyt could stage it like a wreck, but then that's going to raise more questions. Also, unless Charlie glued his picture over everything Hoyt had, I would think someone would notice that too.
Just a dumb, dumb film all around.
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