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Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The
Gratuitous modern take Tobe Hooper's 1974 lo-fi horror masterpiece, produced by Pearl Harbor director Michael Bay. Five teenagers fall victim to an isolated Texan community of cannibal freaks
The original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre remains one of the most iconic, bleak and gloriously brutal horror US films of all time, despite the watering down of the mythos in a series of low-rent sequels and spin-offs. And not only was it a classic film, its very title is potently iconic - no wonder the suits wanted to reuse it. Directed by Marcus Nispel, a pop video graduate, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer prot??g?? Michael Bay (director of silly bombast like Bad Boys II) and scripted by writing newbie Scott Kosar, 2003's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is designed to both rework the original film for an audience of young multiplex consumers and function as a sequel of sorts. It's an interesting approach, and the film even shows promise by starting with a sombre voiceover describing a terrible crime in rural Texas in 1973 and presenting some of the police footage from the crime scene. It then segues into a semi-familiar scenario - five young folk in a knackered van. They're better looking and more sexually feisty than the originals of course. Just back from a jaunt to Mexico they have a pi??ata filled with dope and tickets for a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert in Dallas. Things start getting scary when they pick up a bruised, traumatised girl who is wandering along the dusty isolated road. After muttering "They're all dead. You're all going to die," she blows her brains out (cueing a shot that tracks back through the hole in her head and out the broken rear window of the van). The young 'uns, two couples - busty, earnest Erin (Biel) and big, tough Kemper (Balfour), and hippyish Pepper (Leershen) and boy-band-esque Andy (Vogel) - and a nerd, Morgan (Tucker), bicker then dump their stash and try to contact the cops. But things ain't gonna be so easy, this bein' backcountry Texas 'n' all. And in no time they've met an unhelpful old woman at a knackered gas station, a buck-toothed feral kid (Dorfman), and a fearsome redneck sheriff, Hoyt (Ermey). Worse still, the group separate, Erin and Kemper heading off to find a phone at a house where "the road don't go". Here they meet a foul old man; then Kemper meets his fate - bopped on the head by a huge man wearing a mask of human skin. Yup, our anti-hero has made his entrance. From there on in, things are very predictable. The young things get picked off one by one by Leatherface (Bryniarski) till there's only the genre requisite "last girl", Erin. Some of this is well-handled and the movie doesn't look bad, but where the filmmakers really goof is by taking the most powerful scenes from Hooper's masterpiece then not only recreating them, but expanding and repeating them over and over again. For example, the nastiest shock in the original concerned one youngster getting hoisted aloft while still alive and hung on a meat hook. Here, Andy gets the meat-hook treatment, but then we have to keep on coming back to him squirming and trying to lift himself off. It's satisfactorily nasty, but frankly it just goes on so much the shock value is diminished. Another memorable sequence involved the original last girl (Marilyn Burns' Sally) fleeing through the misty, gloomy scrub chased by the saw-wielding Leatherface. Here, the motif is repeated at least three times. There are exactly two good jumps in this film, and even they're created using a basic trick of having a shadowy form nip across the foreground while the soon-to-be-victims chat, unawares, in the background. The production design and sets, predictably, take the bigger, louder route - the charnel-filled room in the original is now expanded to an enormous basement full of desiccated body parts, human jerky and eyeballs in jars. Worse still, where the original was subtle and left most of the horror to the imagination - WHICH IS HOW IT SHOULD BE DONE! - here we even get to see Leatherface without his mask. Purlease. To its credit, this Texas Chainsaw Massacre is both slick and pretty nasty for a mainstream Hollywood film and it does introduce one new idea. In the original, the kids were preyed upon by an isolated family, but here the whole community seems to be complicit, so even if they do escape the house of horrors, they still have a long way to go to escape the clutches of the flesh-hungry freaks. Verdict By the time it comes back to its bracketing device of police crime scene footage, Niespel, Bay and Kosar's movie has very much wasted its promising start and descended into a pointless exercise. |
