Directed by Marcus Nispel
Written by Scott Kosar
Starring Jessica Biel
and Andrew Bryniarski
Classification: 18A
Rating: **
Hellish family dinners, shrieking chainsaws and a body hanging on meat hooks - there's never been a movie like director Tobe Hooper's 1974 film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I recall reeling out of a grubby downtown multiplex on the afternoon I first saw it, both repulsed and impressed by the hideously original images and the aural assault of whirring blades and relentless screaming. How did such a movie ever get unleashed on the public?
Chainsaw remains an impressively gruesome, blackly funny milestone in putrid noir filmmaking. Though it resonates with the then-contemporary horrors of the Manson family murders and late Vietnam War carnage, Chainsaw was also the principal inspiration for the masked, implement-wielding killers of eighties and nineties slasher films, including three Chainsaw sequels. Fifteen years after its 1974 release, the film was admitted into the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection. In other words, the movie is a one-of-a-kind achievement, a certified classic - and what's the point of imitating a classic?
Gus van Sant, asked for a similar justification for his 1998 remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, said he did it so someone else wouldn't have to. The new Texas Chainsaw Massacre doesn't appear to be so charitably motivated. If the original was the fevered creation of a film auteur maudit, TCM-2003 is a piece of movie-studio product. Reworked for the Scream demographic, the new movie is gruesome enough; what it lacks is a distinctive revolting personality of its own.
After a dismaying black-and-white pseudodocumentary prelude lifted from The Blair Witch Project, the new version begins back in 1973, as five young people are driving a van through Texas. These are recognizably present-day hedonists, smuggling pot from Mexico for profit, and talking knowledgeably about sexually transmitted diseases. The only character of importance is Erin, played by actress Jessica Biel, a L'Oréal model and the vampy minister's daughter on the WB Network's Seventh Heaven. Her role here must be regarded as a re-imaging career move ("Her hot new movie & style" promises the current cover of Seventeen magazine).
In TCM-2003, she is dressed, either circa 1973 or 2003, in a midriff-baring top and skin-tight low-rider flared jeans that provides the film's first and worst shock - the realization that the most ridiculed year in modern fashion history is back in style.
The movie is photographed by Daniel C. Pearl, who shot Hooper's original film as a quasi-documentary. Director Marcus Nispel, a rock-video veteran (Janet Jackson, Faith No More) shows a flashy hand - and a pointless sadistic streak that marks him as the film's No. 1 villain. When a suicidal young hitchhiker shoots herself, the camera follows the bullet in slow motion as it enters her mouth and splatters the back of her skull. This sequence is so violent, flippant and showy, it suggests the influence of producer Michael Bay ( Pearl Harbor, The Rock, Armageddon), whose trademark as a director is multiangle machine-gun editing, a kind of panicky excitement in a vacuum.
The movie's mean streak shows in other ways. Driving around in their brain-smeared van, the kids seek help from the locals, an excuse for a sustained bout of white-trash bashing. Who can help them: the corpse-molesting sheriff or the old lady with the fly-covered pig heads in her shop widow? The curmudgeon in the wheelchair, the boy with the deformed overbite or the hugely obese woman in the trailer? Wherever they turn, the kids find more menace and substandard hygiene and grooming.
While the locals' infirmities get lots of attention, Leatherface, the boisterous, clumsy star of the original Chainsaw, seems more like he's doing a cameo than a leading role - and Lord knows, it's hard to do a cameo when you have no face. His chainsaw technique seems calmly surgical compared with the convulsive editing of the chase scenes.
Most of the camera's quieter moments focus on the face and body of Biel as she follows the buff girl heroics of the Linda/Sigourney/Angelina tradition, as she turns into a baby-saving killing machine. In the movie's best action sequence, Leatherface plays cat to Erin's mouse around a slaughterhouse freezer through rows of hanging animal carcasses.
For a moment, there's an echo of the original spirit of Hooper's film and its ruthless, lurid depiction of human meat, but even that is buried under hard-sell gimmicks. When the camera stops spinning long enough to find Biel cowering and shivering between the ribs of a beef carcass in her clinging wet T-shirt, TCM-2003 is more fashionably cool than bone-chilling. She looks as if she's starring in a provocative new Gap ad.