The 7th entry in a fatigued franchise that failed dismally at utilizing a hot new trend before it was cool gets put through the streaming grinder

2018’s Halloween might take most of the credit – or blame, depending on how you want to look at it – for ushering in one of horror’s newest crazes, but Texas Chainsaw 3D technically got there first.

Arriving five years before Michael Myers decided to disregard the entirety of his canon bar his first appearance in John Carpenter’s classic, Leatherface was given the same treatment in a direct follow-up to Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that ignored the five successors to have come before.

It would have been a great deal more beneficial to all parties were the end product to not be terrible, but you can’t win ’em all. Trashed by critics, crowds, and fans of the franchise alike, Texas Chainsaw 3D could only rustle up respective Rotten Tomatoes approval ratings of 19 and 40 percent, while a $47 million haul at the box office saw it fall short of both the remake and the prequel that had both released within the space of the last decade.

Even the added dimension couldn’t polish this particular turd, while its reinvention of Leatherface as something approaching an antihero infuriated the purists who prefer their iconic mass murderers to be irredeemable and a million miles beyond salvation.

Spooky season may have passed as we enter Mariah Carey territory, but Texas Chainsaw 3D has weaponized some of that lingering goodwill to hold on for dear life on streaming, with FlixPatrol revealing that Starz subscribers have opted to put themselves through the meat grinder and barrel through its interminable 92 minutes.