THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (2003) So...whose dumbfuck idea was this? Throughout this remake of the 1974 classic, the viewer is constantly made witness to the efforts of a lot of people who wanted to make a quality horror movie. Here's the problem: I don't think the director was one of them. I also have doubts about the screenwriter, and I know damn well producer Michael Bay couldn't give a shit how good it was as long as it made him a percentage and mentioned his name in the ads. I reacted to news of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake with reflexive dread, as I would later to news of a Dawn Of The Dead remake, though not as intensely because Bay wasn't involved with that one. But both movies gave us a pretty cool trailer, and once I actually saw the Dawn remake, I was so surprised by how much I liked it I rented this as soon as it came out on video. The story isn't a straight retread, but it's close enough (with lots of details jumbled around) that, despite leaving a lot less to the imagination, it's made "true to the spirit" of the original, if that means anything to you. (it means less to me than it did two weeks ago) John Larroquette even reads the intro narration again, repeating even that dumbass line "It is all the more tragic in that they were young". We hear this as we watch a reel of police-shot crime scene footage, before we see the movie proper. Same story, more or less: five teenagers in a van on their way to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert, driving through a region of Texas which has never seen a health inspector. They pick up a hitchhiker (of a very different nature this time) who embroils them in a world of hurt, involving them in the affairs of the family Hewitt, which is an even funnier name than Sawyer. The cinematography from returning Daniel Pearl (no, not THAT Daniel Pearl...the cinematographer from the original movie) is pretty slick, but it works. The movie has a good grim jaundiced sepias-and-grays look to it. The production design is excellent. Everything drips, all the time; one wonders what the Hewitt's plumbing bill must look like. Everywhere we go to looks to be four decades past its prime, in a state of inexorable decay. The sets are disgusting, the props are ghoulish. One can almost smell Erica Leerhsen's vomit, even before she vomits (twice). So most of the time, the movie looks great and fells right. If you like horror movies with as little positive, life-affirming content as possible, you may be pleased to know that at every turn in this movie, altruism and doing the right thing is punished in the most violent possible way. Every time somebody suggests doing the selfish thing (dumping the body, running off and abandoning their friend, whatever), it turns out to have been a good idea. So...why does all this grimness keep getting sabotaged with cheesy gimmicks and clichéd false scares? How can we be horrified by a gruesome suicide when the camera makes a "gee, cool!" pull through the gaping wound? How can the dread and despair of the situation the teens find themselves in possibly survive a False Scare By Prankster, let alone the False Scare By Cat which turns out to be a possum? How can we be horrified by the big money shot of seeing one of the teens' faces draped over Leatherface's head when we've already seen him working on making the damn thing into a mask? Director Marcus Nispel is an MTV grad, and it would be tempting to dismiss him as a hack on that alone were it not for there being a few MTV grads out there whose work doesn't suck, and really is stylish instead of just fashionable (David Fincher...that's all that's coming to mind). To his credit, he does not seem to be prone to the quick-cut hysteria of his boss (though if you want to give an impression of isolation in a vast landscape, you can't show it for two seconds and expect to have the intended effect). But he doesn't seem to understand that this kind of silliness is not any better. I'm sure he thought the camera pull through the head was very clever, but we've seen it before. A few times, in more light-hearted movies where it actually could work. It could never work in this movie; it's the first moment in the film which is meant to have a hard, visceral impact and it's completely blown. The script by Scott Kosar pays constant homage to the original, some of it fairly clever, some of it just obvious. The teens are mostly pretty faceless (only Jonathan Tucker approaches the obnoxiousness of the original cast) and not as blandly pretty as most horror-movie teens these days, excepting Jessica Biel who spends the movie in a wet tank top that's tied up at the front for maximum breast-huggery and navel-exposure. One of her last scenes has her evading Leatherface in a slaughterhouse...despite the horrors she'd borne witness to in the previous several scenes, she's still all "eew, gross!" from hanging half-cows. The freak family is big, I think the biggest in any Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie. Some members are pretty lame, like the obese matron who coos "Such a sweet, sweet boy" about Leatherface. I'm sure there might have been a time when such a characterization might have been spooky and disturbing, but it must have been long before Stan's mom said it on South Park. Other freaks, you might hardly notice at all - I forgot that little kid existed until he showed up again, and promptly forgot about him again. Terrence Evans is amusingly repellent a legless man who uses his handicap (and colostomy bag) to not only secure one teen's fate, but to cop some feels while he's at it. And then there's R. Lee Ermey. Ermey specializes in playing loud, forceful, intimidating people who never fail to command your full attention, and this role is no exception. This guy is every moment on screen somebody you wouldn't want to piss off. He's more or less playing the Jim Siedow character; the guy in the family who can pass for normal in the "real world" if he has to. Ermey's character is a lot more mean and cruel than Siedow's, and probably couldn't keep up the façade in front of civilized people for as long because his insanity is so much more explosive. If you're forgiving, Ermey's performance alone might well make watching this movie worthwhile. As for Leatherface himself, we learn he had a bad skin condition as a kid. Thus the masks of human skin, I guess. We actually see him unmasked in this movie and he doesn't have a nose. Four Leatherface movies before this, and I don't think we ever got to see his face, and this one lets us see it halfway through. Actually, I think that's one of the more inspired decisions here; the climactic gruesome-face unmasking hasn't been successfully pulled off in ages. Performed (indeed) by one Andrew Bryniarski, he gets to run around and grunt and wheeze a lot, swing that chainsaw (pretty big chainsaw!), hang a guy up on a meathook, all the things Leatherface does. It seems like all the ingredients for a good horror movie are here (unless you demand originality, which isn't here), and I was relieved to see that the lengthy dinner/screaming/head-whacking scene from the original is not reprised here. But there are bad things too, and too many of them. There's a chase through hanging laundry, ferchrissakes. Nispel and Kosar needed somebody to go through this movie and periodically ask "Whose dumbfuck idea was this?" Thing is, that was Michael Bay's job...and what could Michael Bay possibly recognize as a dumbfuck idea? What should even he be able to spot? Here's one: the ending finally brings us back to that black-and-white crime-scene footage with further narration from John Larroquette. This ending is so Blair Witch, if it were any more Blair Witch they'd have to put "Blair Witch" in the title. I cannot imagine this ending getting anything but groans and uneasy, contemptuous laughter from an audience. Well, that's what it got from me, anyway. BACK TO THE T's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE