Tuesday 25 October 2011

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

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Year:2003
Country of origin:USA
Director:Marcus Nispel
Genre:Redneck remake
Starring:Jessica Biel, Jonathan Tucker, Erica Leerhsen, Mike Vogel, Andrew Bryniarski
Rating:3/5
IMDB link:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0324216/
Tagline:Inspired by a True Story
Favourite line:"The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of 5 youths. It is all the more tragic in that they were young. But had they lived very, very long lives, they could not have expected, nor would they have wished to see as much of the mad and macabre as they were to see that day..."

Big budget, Hollywood remake of a genuine classic.
The setup is similar:
A bunch of 'kids' are driving through Texas on their way home from Mexico to pick up a big bag of dope, and are unfortunate enough to run into a family of deviant cannibals, with a chainsaw wielding son.
The details are different here though:
At the start of the movie, as in the original, the group pick up a hitchhiker. In the 1974 movie, this turns out to be one of the cannibal family, but here it is one of their victims, desperate to escape. So desperate in fact that she puts a revolver in her mouth and blows her head off when she mistakenly believes they are taking her back. The group then try to report the incident to the police, only to discover to their cost that the local sherriff isn't exactly the sympathetic type and, one by one, they fall victim to the family, by hook or by chainsaw.
More graphic than the original, this somehow manages to be not as grimy.
Very much influenced by the Saw / Hostel school of film-making, this is at times horror by numbers, but is still reasonably effective throughout.
Leatherface is played more as a demonic horror villain than in the original, and the thought throughout is that, somehow, they are trying just a little too hard to separate this from the source material; giving Leatherface a congenital skin condition to justify his behaviour, the previous family of victims, the kidnapped baby, the climax in the meat factory.
Jumpy in places, this may not stand up to the original in terms of sheer class, but it is not a bad effort for mainstream Hollywood horror fare.

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