the texas chainsaw massacre (2003)

review by rob gonsalves

director
Marcus Nispel

screenwriter
Scott Kosar
based on a screenplay by
Kim Henkel  
Tobe Hooper

producers
Michael Bay
Mike Fleiss

cinematographer
Daniel Pearl

music
Steve Jablonsky

editor
Glen Scantlebury

cast

Jessica Biel (Erin)
Jonathan Tucker (Morgan)
Erica Leerhsen (Pepper)
Mike Vogel (Andy)
Eric Balfour (Kemper)
Andrew Bryniarski (Leatherface)
R. Lee Ermey (Sheriff Hoyt)
David Dorfman (Jedidiah)
Lauren German (Teenage Girl)
Terrence Evans (Old Monty)
Marietta Marich (Luda May)
Heather Kafka (Henrietta)
Kathy Lamkin (Tea Lady in Trailer)
John Larroquette (Narrator)

mpaa rating: R
running time: 98m
u.s. release: 10/17/03
video availability: VHS - DVD
official website

see also:

- the texas chainsaw massacre (1974)

It begins well enough, with John Larroquette delivering a somber preliminary narration, just as he did thirty years ago. Unfortunately, that's about as much respect for the source as you'll find in the pointless new remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Tobe Hooper's original 1974 film (see here for my shameless genuflection to it) is, for me, the great American horror movie -- even its title puts people off and carries the sweaty whiff of the drive-in. But Hooper transformed exploitation into art, especially in the celebrated dinner scene, wherein shell-shocked victim Marilyn Burns was treated to a high-stress meal with chainsaw-wielding psycho Leatherface and his guffawing family. The remake has no dinner scene, which is kind of like a remake of Psycho without the shower scene (at least Gus Van Sant attempted it).

Director Marcus Nispel, whose previous claim to fame was getting fired from End of Days, here seems to want to outdo Waterworld: This is the wettest movie I believe I've ever seen. And not just gore; Nispel never met a brackish liquid he didn't like, and characters are continually covered with sweat, muck, rain, water drizzling from basement pipes. The movie has a damp, icky feel, compounded by the drained-out cinematography of Daniel Pearl, who found evil in rays of sunshine when he shot the original Chainsaw. Pearl certainly doesn't try to duplicate what he did before: This movie is as gray and soggy as a day in London. And it dilutes what should be the film's specificity -- with all the rain and gloom, outdoors and inside, it might as well have been shot in Seattle.

We're to understand this is not so much a remake as a "rethinking," so although we get five doomed young people in a van, they're not the same characters as in the original film (no whiny, wheelchair-bound Franklin, for instance). Jessica Biel is first-billed as the clean-living Erin; owing to her starring status and the fact that she refuses the offer of a joint, Biel is certain to survive. The others, including Eric Balfour of Six Feet Under and Erica Leerhsen of Blair Witch 2, won't be so lucky. The merry youngsters, on their way to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert (hey, the movie is set in 1973), pick up a dazed, traumatized hitcher, a teenage girl who couldn't be more unlike the cackling hitchhiker in Hooper's film. She has her own shock value, though; she produces a pistol from somewhere between her legs and blows her brains out right there in the van.

This wastes a lot of time because the characters are then faced with the ethical and legal issues of what to do with a fresh suicide victim's corpse. They call the local sheriff, who turns out to be R. Lee Ermey in full wingnut mode, Saran-Wrapping the corpse and later forcing one of the kids to engage in a little Russian roulette. Ermey at least looks to be having fun; nobody else is, though I guess there's a ceiling on how much joy can be had from playing a scene in which one dangles from a meat hook with the stump of a sawed-off leg.

Soon enough we meet Leatherface (hulking Andrew Bryniarski, who, like the others who played the role in the three sequels to Hooper's film, misses the skittish humanity Gunnar Hansen brought to the killer), who has been given a new reason for wearing the faces of his victims as masks: he has no nose. Yes, Leatherface (foolishly given a real name, too: Thomas Hewitt) was born with a skin disorder that made him the object of ridicule and, subsequently, the chainsaw-happy psycho he is today. Feh. In the original, he was a lunatic in a family of lunatics; the family he gets here is decidedly pallid, and there's no moment as hilariously fine as Jim Siedow's beloved line, "Look what your brother did to the door!"

Is the new Chainsaw scary? Not to these eyes; it struck me as just needlessly ugly and unpleasant, not to mention Hollywoodized down to its muddy shoes: There's a kindhearted inbred-looking kid who helps save the day, and a baby who's there solely to be rescued by the star. I hoped to see a loyal dog at Leatherface's side to make the schmaltz complete, but no such luck. Chainsaw '03 is too dull to be a true desecration; like the Psycho remake, it's a little hard to get too angry at it when there've already been three bad sequels tainting the memory of the original masterpiece. It isn't stealing Hooper's movie off of my shelf and replacing it with itself, so the rehash doesn't even deserve the energy of my scorn, or the word count I've already expended on it. It's just further proof that those who can, make; those who can't, remake.