Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning(2006)
Director: Johnathan Liebesman
Starring: Jordana Brewster, Diora Baird

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Review of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. (Directed by Jonathan Liebesman. Staring Jordana Brewster, Diora Baird.

by Roy Seeger

I don’t want to be the type of reviewer to lament that the remake is never as good as the original. That is too easy. Besides, to compare The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning to the original 74’ version is unfair. But even when we compare it to the remake of a couple years ago, it is lacking in originality and character development. Instead, what The Beginning focuses on is atmosphere, gore, and beautiful victims. Granted, the atmosphere is lush and gritty: big budget gritty, a bunch of beautiful mutilated ladies and men in carefully applied dirt and blood. There are some truly nice scenes where special effects create a genuinely creepy moment, however, these moments are mostly undercut by the fact that they are barrowed from previous versions of the franchise. Occasionally, however, director Liebesmen tries too hard to impress us with his special effects which then come off as comical instead of disturbing. This movie would most appeal to the Fear Factor crowd who hasn’t seen the first remake, or for people who want to see trivial connections with the original remake. (I didn’t care.)

The plot formula is not surprising anymore, and in places is embarrassingly predictable (he’s in the back seat?). Any changes are superficial: two brothers with their special ladies go to register for the Vietnam War (except one brother is secretly going to run to Mexico). The attempt at political commentary is embarrassing and, like most of this movie, superficial.
What so bugs me about this prequel to a remake is that it could have been so good. The idea of developing the circumstances around this family, to in a sense make these characters more sympathetic, greatly intrigued me. Leatherface is one of the great slasher villains because he is a misguided, mistreated child. The premise of showing Leatherface growing up working in the slaughter house and being ridiculed was exhausted in the first five minutes, which are by far the most interesting part of the movie which should have ended where it began, with the death of the slaughter house owner.

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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning is fairly typical of a new type of American Horror movie that I have begun noticing. I mentioned the phrase Fear Factor crowd. In the last five or so years, there have been a slew of movies where the major focus is gore, and very beautiful people. Take Cabin Fever. The Original Remake to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Wrong Turn (a similar plot to Chainsaw but this family is in the trees). And so on. These elements are not of themselves bad things, but they seem to all too often replace character development and an interesting storyline. I won’t even get into the fact that almost every American horror movie today seems to be a remake of an old or foreign movie (save that for another rant), but just in comparing the two Chainsaw franchises, we can see a lot of the problems with this current sub-genre: they tend to completely miss the point of the original and they assume that gore is scary. Aside from the general lack of political commentary in the remake (which, in the original, gave the family a social context and made them a tinge more sympathetic) the characters are flat. I never really noticed the extent of this flatness until I recently, after watching The Beginning, caught the opening of the original. It is the part where a group of travelers pick up a hitchhiker (just like in the remake.) Except in the original it is a scrawny guy who is obviously a local. He seems happy and eager to please his new friends. So much so that he barrows a knife from one and uses it to make a deep cut in the palm of his hand. His smile betrays his obvious glee. That one scene is more terrifying and disturbing than all the crazy camera angles and clean dirt of both remakes.