THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (2003)

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE… it’s been a part of my life since I was 3 years old and Gunnar Hansen came roaring with that chainsaw into the living room of my house, straight off the set… and there was that basket of body parts, of which I took a hand… and that year I got a Playschool Yellow and Orange Chainsaw with vibrating blade and I cut my Godzilla eating my family birthday cake… Agreed… it was a strange childhood.

20 years later, I’m sitting in a field at the Rolling Roadshow, Alamo Drafthouse, Austin Film Society, Ain’t It Cool News screening of the remake of that horror classic, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. The Pauper’s Graveyard over yonder, the abandoned institution for the disturbed behind me and behind the screen… a penitentiary. In attendance one of the greatest character actors of all time… R. Lee Ermey.

The number one complaint you’ll see about the remake of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE is that it isn’t the original TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. It’s an understandable gripe. Sure, this film has actors in it, the original feels like it doesn’t. I’m not really sure how the original feels like a real snuff film, but it does. The film feels contaminated and seedy. Tobe Hooper, Kim Henkel and Bob Burns’ great albeit cheap production design leant an air of authenticity to it.

For the subsequent CHAINSAW flicks… all these elements were enhanced, taken to the umpteenth degree. One of the first productions I ever got to poke around on was the set of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 - My father was friends at an artist’s facility called the ART’S WAREHOUSE and they both had there workshops there. Poking around a real make up and movie fx creation outlet fried my young brain. But even then… I thought it was all being taken way over the top.

What I love about this remake is that in many ways… it tries to tone down the production design so that it isn’t just so ludicrous. In some ways I think they might’ve toned it down a bit too much… there’s a part of me that misses the bone furniture and the wind chimes. Except, at the same time… I love the look of the film. This wasn’t some giant production… much of the production look of this film was simply found.

That big house, that’s the way it looks, the slaughterhouse… that’s the way it looks. As a result, there’s a very real sense of decay that isn’t heightened or exaggerated. The cinematography is absolutely gorgeous for this film. I dare say, you’re not likely to find a more beautifully shot Slasher film ever. This thing just is beautiful. Is that wrong? I don’t know, I just found myself entranced by it though. You could analyze the lighting as being ludicrous, but at the same time, there’s an almost art film quality to it, that just makes me think… “God, how perverse.”

Admittedly, when I saw this film, I was coming off of seeing KILL BILL, which is the goriest film in R-rated history… but TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE is really intense… More than that though… they brought back Leatherface as being a butcher. It’s just meat. Watching him rub salt in the wound and wrapping the stump in butcher paper, while the agonized screaming body of the victim is squirming on the hook still alive… OUCH!

This is a Studio A-List Horror film… personally in many ways, I feel this is a film along the same lines as WILLARD for me, the other A-List Horror film that New Line put out this year. WILLARD didn’t do particularly well at the box office, and it is my understanding that TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE is tracking extremely well for them, so I don’t know where you stand on WILLARD, but for me… It was the best damn studio horror film in quite some time. I felt it was absolutely perfect. TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE doesn’t break any particularly new ground in the Horror genre, it isn’t really reinventing much of anything. What it is though… is a no nonsense horror flick where people are going to die, and it isn’t going to be all that happy when it is over.

Leatherface isn’t given much of a back-story, neither are the teens. BUT – Leatherface moves like Leatherface originally did… He doesn’t act like an emotionally disturbed huffer with a whining problem. He acts like someone that’s killing meat.

R. Lee Ermey on the other hand is chewing up the scenery. His interrogation scenes in this flick are truly on the rotten in Denmark side of things. You will be disturbed by this man, cuz he really does push it here. The scene of him and the kid in the van is classic. His removal and wrapping of the body sequence is just unhinged. He’s just wonderful, as always, and isn’t going for humor, but rather for nightmarish. I think he nails it. He is the country sheriff of your nightmares.

Jessica Biel… She’s gorgeous, and I can’t think of an actress that has run screaming as much as her in a film in a very long time. I mean, it feels like for the last 30 minutes she’s running, screaming, hiding and running again. She’s quite convincing as the scared girl. She’s so much better than the recent “scream queens” and if this movie wasn’t titled TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, you wouldn’t really have a gripe.. it’s just Marilyn Burns’ frantic runs from Leatherface were more intense… to me. That running crashing through the glass leap from the second floor in the original… that dinner table scene… see, that’s the only problem… those scenes are so great that you almost can’t bare to not not bring them up… except… I feel she’s got some moments in this film that are as intense… the sequence with her friend above the piano… that’s intense. Her scene face first in the dirt with R. Lee is great.

I think the initial hook of the film is a bit more intense than the stumbling into hell of the original, except that I think… that “shit happens” kinda way the original began somehow feels more valid, than the intense as hell conundrum these teens find themselves in.

I think the most jarring moment of the film was my cameo… it completely took me out of the film. All I could think was… look… my head… cool… but then there was the laughter from the audience and the clapping, and suddenly I was out of the movie. That’s a personal problem though… anytime I see myself in a film, it’s this odd sense of… WHAT AM I DOING THERE? Still, it’s cool to be in a pretty damn good TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE film!

As a kid that sort of was introduced to horror via this film invading my house. The original film’s hitchhiker, Ed Neal… he and my dad and I all dealt Movie Memorabilia at shows and he’d come into my house and act really scary all the time. So I’m not sure just how appropriate this review is for most of you.

I mean… it’d be like if a kid that grew up in Pittsburgh grew up to have a zombie cameo in the new DAWN OF THE DEAD, and then review it… but that’d only work if the producers of that flick had decided to shoot back in Pittsburgh like the original. But you get my meaning.

For a kid in Austin, Texas that grew up within the culture that surrounded the original TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, this flick is a welcome return to many of the values that the original had. It isn’t playing it for a joke. This is a film about a group of kids that are going to be slaughtered by some really fucked up people living in Travis County (where I live) I love that it is period. I love that it is pretty fucking intense, and I’ll see it opening weekend, cuz I’m dying to hear the digital sound on this baby, cuz that’s one thing about an outdoor screening that you lose… acoustics. However, it was a great event, and a really fun flick. I don’t think it’s a startling reinvention of the genre or a perfection piece of filmmaking as David Poland seems to make out that it is, but heck… I’m jaded. I’ve grown up with this type of horror for breakfast. I will say this… Marcus Nispel does a damn good job on this film and while the script may stick by a few too many hallmarks of the genre to be the great reinvention that Dave seems to think… it is nice to see it abandon completely that self-referential bullshit that SCREAM plagued Slasher horror with for far too long. This is going back to the roots, and the harshest criticism is that it just doesn’t quite bottle that same lightning that Tobe did. Tobe still owns the best saw in town!