Directed by Marcus Nispel
Starring Jessica Biel, Jonathan Tucker, Erica Leerhsen, Mike Vogel, Eric Balfour and R. Lee Ermey
This fact is very surprising to yours truly, but the original, 1974 Tobe Hooper Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a very polarizing movie. It's very much a "love or hate" thing, with members of one camp believing it to be some sort of depraved, debauched masterpiece of macabre film-making and the other just finding it lame as all get out. Color me in with the former group. Maybe it was the sneak viewing of it that I pulled in my parents' basement circa 1995 (when I was 12 years old, for those counting), but this is a movie that got under my skin immediately and still gives me a case of the skin-crawling willies when I dig it out for a biannual-ish watch.
More than anything else, the original TCM was a movie that, to me, just felt real. For starters, it was a movie that was filmed on a budget that I can't even use my standard "filet-o-fish value meal" punchline for, and I had to believe that filming a straight-up snuff film where all of this stuff was actually happening was cheaper than doing whatever Hooper did to try to fake it. And then there was Marilyn Burns. For as much as Leatherface and his ilk disturbed me as a kid, it was Marilyn Burns and her constant soul-wrenching screaming toward the end that haunted my dreams for days on end in my fifth grade summer.
Which brings me to this movie. Released in 2003 by Michael F**kin' Bay's Platinum Dunes production company, this is arguably the movie that ushered in the "let's remake every popular horror movie from the '70s and '80s" tilt that continued for years unabated and has only recently died down ever-so-slightly. But that's another story. You kow, they tried. I can't fault Bay and his proto-manservant Marcus Nispel for not giving it their damndest with this flick (which is more than I can say for some of their other efforts, not the least of which being A Nightmare on Paint By Numbers Street), but the whole essence of the original TCM is something that can't be duplicated, no matter how much bronzer Nispel slathered on his camera lenses or how much dirt he threw on his cast of hot young actors.
I suppose that's enough rambling. Let's get down to business.
PLOT: If you've seen the original film, you know the basics. Group of 1973-era college kids find themselves taking a VERY wrong turn at Albuquerque and wind up at the residence of a group of cannibalistic meat salesman, the lead killer of which being a very beastly man wearing a mask made of human skin. That much is kept intact in this version, and it's a perfectly good, classic setup. Of course, that's based on the assumption that you're (a) into this stuff, and (b) have a pretty strong stomach. It's where this movie differs from the original story-wise that it unfortunately falls very flat, mostly because for much of the movie's running time we're blessed with this guy as a sort of secondary villain.
PLOT RATING: * 1/2 out of ****.
CHARACTERS AND ACTORS: So far, we've only mentioned Ermey's Sheriff Hoyt by name, and a lot of the others in this movie don't need mentioning. Unfortunately, that's my job, so what do we got? Well, there's Jessica Biel, who was at the peak of her post- (I think) 7th Heaven young hottie phase as one of the young college partyers whose name I can't be bothered to look up. She's the only member of the caravan that we can't immediately single out as future Leatherface fodder, and that's pretty much all you need to know. The only other cast member I recognized was Erica Leehrsen, the star of the godawful Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (how bad? it's worse than her other horror credit - the masterpiece that was Wrong Turn 2). The characters, by and large, are annoying and unsympathetic, and while that can be a good thing if you've got a likable final girl, that's not the case here.
CHARACTERS AND ACTORS RATING: * 1/2 out of ****.
COOL FACTOR: I remember reading a report before this movie's release that Nispel was going to be shooting for a "more suspenseful, less shocking" approach with this movie, or something else with equally flowery dialogue. I think it's safe to say that he failed big time in that regard. For a movie called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original film was actually pretty damn bloodless. Compare that to this movie, which featured gore and grue by the bucketload, including one wholly unnecessary scene near the end where Biel helps one of her fallen compatriots, alive and impaled on a meat hook, commit suicide. The scene is admittedly uncomfortable, but not in the good way - it's more like watching a Ryback match where he botches move after move and damn near kills the dude in the ring with him.
Finally, I have to do some commenting on the big guy himself. The character of Leatherface, overgrown man-child villain who wears the skins of his victims, isn't a horror villain that lends itself to gaining rooting interest (Jason) or cracking jokes (take a guess). He's always been more about unnerving viewers. I can't fault Andrew Bryniarski for his aplomb in taking on the 'Face, as he was more than game for what it entailed. But he is onscreen MUCH more than Gunner Hansen's legendary version in Hooper's movie and doing much more murdering. Time to bring back one of my annoying personality traits and say "less is more," because he's just not a particularly scary or memorable villain in this go-round. Mystique goes a long way, people.
COOL FACTOR: * 1/2 out of ****.
OVERALL: I remember acutally being very stoked to see this movie in theaters back in Halloween season of 2003. It seemed like the dawning of a new age - a movie that I grew up loving that most sensible adults told me was dumb and/or depraved was getting a slick modernization seemed like a justification for my own geekiness. Instead, what we get with TCM 2003 is everything that I've outlined above - a professionally made, polished horror film, no doubt, but one that ultimately does away with damn near everything that made the original film stand out from the pack (and this is a trend that Bay and his goons Andrew Form and Brad Fuller would continue as they worked their way through slasher icons like a cheap hooker and left their own special brand of VD on each one). There's no gritty, drawn-out "dinner" scene, no skull-bashing, no creepy "family member" hitch-hiker. Instead, we've got R. Lee Ermey and a really dumb ending where wispy, model thin actress Jessica Biel managed to hack off Leatherface's arm with a meat cleaver, thus making any direct sequels pretty much null and void in the process. Oh yeah, spoiler alert.
OVERALL RATING: * 1/2 out of ****. I was hoping that another viewing of this movie would be a little bit more enjoyable than that rather drab, weird experience in theaters more than ten years ago, but alas, it's just as excessive and disappointing now as it was then.
No comments:
Post a Comment