Texas Chainsaw Massacre Running Time: 98 minutes Rated R Starring: Jessica Biel, Eric Balfour and Andrew Bryniarski Directed by Marcus Nispel Two stars
"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" comes off the heels of last year's lucrative remake of "The Ring" and hopes to be another successful money-maker.
This updated version of "Chainsaw" does not follow the plot of the original exactly, but does hold onto a few distinct moments in an attempt to capture the essence of the first film. While it succeeds in scaring the audience, like Gus Van Sant's remake of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," it fails to live up to the original and ultimately is a pointless revisit to a horror classic.
This version features four teens who become trapped in the area around a house in rural Texas on their way to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. A psychotic family that seeks only to torment the unfortunate teens resides in the house.. Jennifer Biel ("7th Heaven") and company perform admirably as ill-fated youngsters. However, viewers can't shake the feeling that the cast of "I Know What You Did Last Summer" has stumbled into an indie-classic.
Apparently someone felt that these kids needed to be smuggling two pounds of marijuana into the United States from Mexico at the start of the film. The ante is instantly upped again,by switching the original's crazy hitchhiker into a suicidal young girl who messily blows her brains all over their van. The camera travels inside her digitally-animated bloody head, and the shot is too outlandish, it's just plain gross.
Most of the violence in the original version was implied, leaving a lot of the gruesome details up to the viewer's imagination. While this technique is not popular in modern horror, it is almost always more effective in inciting fear into the audience, as opposed to a slew of contrived pop-outs. This 2003 update reveals early on that it's going for the gross-out method.
Still, the cinematography in this version of "Chainsaw" is sometimes gorgeous. The movie starts out bright with a yellow tint and grows visually darker, echoing the thematic progression of the film. Although the cinematic style of this version is a glaring contrast from the original, it works.
The original 1974 version was shot in the exact opposite way. With the small production value and the stagnant shots, it felt almost like a documentary. The original "Chainsaw" is methodical in its ability to sicken the audience into not only identifying with the victims, but creating an environment that puts you into the movie. It is all too real. In Nispel's update, it's too much like every movie that follows the now clich?d path that "Chainsaw" forged almost 30 years ago.
Unlike Eli Roth's recent horror film "Cabin Fever," which takes the original "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" blueprint and livens it with a distinct humor and style all its own, this "Chainsaw" update seems trapped in the formula. One can only wonder if New Line will resort to teaming Leatherface up against the likes of Freddy or Jason after the success of their b-movie brawl. With this new version of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," the studio indicates that no film is above being milked for all its worth, despite its caliber.
