Horror Movie Desperation
I saw The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on Friday. Maybe I was still feeling the residual effects from House of the Dead and was desperate for a horror movie that worked on any level at all, but the best word I can use to describe this film is "effective."

Well, I guess some other appropriate words would be, "brutal," "unforgiving," or, "nearly unendurable." So I can't sit here and tell you it was good. Saying it was good, in my mind, would indicate that I came away from the film with something positive. Sometimes a good scare can be very cleansing. Instead, I walked out feeling beaten up. But, my god, if there's been a more effective horror movie released in the past decade, I haven't seen it.

The difference is two pounds of pot!
The movie does share a few things with its source material, but many of the details are different. Both versions start off the same: five kids in a van, driving through rural Texas. Alas, an invalid goob named Franklin is nowhere to be found in the new one. Plus, in what is perhaps a cynical attempt to gain hipness cred with their target audience, the filmmakers decided to have the kids driving back from Mexico with two pounds of pot in the car. Two pounds! It seemed a little excessive to me, too.

The flashpoint for the plotlines of both movies is fundamentally the same: the kids pick up a hitchhiker. From there, things go off in fairly different directions. You may remember the hitchhiker from the original was a creepy bastard who fetishistically described the workflow at a slaughterhouse, and then stabbed Franklin. Man, Franklin was such a pussy. In the new version, the hitchhiker is a girl suffering from some severe trauma, and to tell you anything more would be to spoil the film. During the scene with this hitchhiker, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre passes a point of no return, and you start to realize what you're in for.

And I'd like to say that the film only maintains that level of intensity, but alas, it elevates it in short order with the arrival of the sherriff. You might remember the actor, R. Lee Ermey. His first bigtime role was the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket. Since then, he's appeared in tons of movies, big and small, nearly always as a military officer, cop, or coach. He's just that kind of guy. But he's never been like he is in this movie. I know the Academy won't even deign to consider him for a shortlist of potential nominees, but Jesus Christ. It's the most unsettling performance I've seen since - wait for it - Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter. Yes, it's a fair comparison. Ermey owns the screen every second he's up there, and what he does to these characters is sick.

Nobody does anything particularly stupid.
That's the biggest strength and the biggest weakness of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The characters are simply brutalized the whole time. There are no pauses for comic relief, nobody starts fucking right when things are getting really bad, and nobody does anything particularly stupid. If you can accept as a premise that a family of cannibals really might be preying upon everyone who passes through their town, then the events in this movie proceed as realistically as they possibly could. The kids are scared, but they don't decide to split up and go wandering into dark spaces shouting, "Hello?" Mostly, they run until they get caught. And they all get caught.

There are the usual graphically violent scenes, like severed limbs. The meathook makes a return from the original, also. As stark as the violence is, what's disturbing is not the amount of blood, but the cruelty with which it's dispatched. Kill Bill was an exceedingly violent film, and almost certainly, were you to tally up gruesome deaths from both films, more graphic than Chainsaw. But Kill Bill had a weird kind of a joy, enough winks from Tarantino to let us know the whole movie was an exercise in filmmaking. While the Chainsaw remake does not quite capture the documentary feel of the original, it similarly has no time for irony. The kids are not only murdered, but humiliated first.

PRETTY!
Oddly, this movie is also one of the prettiest horror movies I've seen. The cinematography is gorgeous. There's a scene somewhat early on where the characters are walking through a copse of trees, and light is beaming down all around them. Looks like something Terence Malick would do. Night shots of the house are beautiful also, with a navy blue sky and logically ridiculous backlighting.

Yeah, I have complaints. Jessica Biel is a fine, fine woman, and that's ok, but I think if I were filming the climactic scene of a movie this sadistic, I would not pause to soak through her white shirt and make sure her nipples are popping off the screen. That's really distracting. Additionally, it's just hard to say I liked a movie like this. It's hard to tell people they should see it. The last good horror movie I saw in theaters was The Ring, and I don't remember walking out of that movie with my head down. If I recall correctly, I talked excitedly to people about it, and it had scared me. This movie, though... I wanted to be left alone afterwards.

I mean, if you're up for something like that, by all means, check it out. It will make you poop your pants.

On the web: This article was originally published in Mitch's blog.