Texas Toast

Year: 2006

Director: Jonathan Liebesman

Cast: Jordana Brewster, Matt Bomer, Diora Baird

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Here we are folks. At the time of this writing, this is my final review in the extant Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise! As we all know, horror franchises never truly die. I'm sure we can expect Texas Chainsaw 4D: The Leatherface Tapes by the end of the decade, but for now we can lay this series to rest with a surprisingly pretty good prequel to a surprisingly pretty great remake - The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning.

It's nearly unprecedented in this day and age for a remake to have a legitimate followup. The only even tangentially related films of the past ten years that come to mind are I Spit On Your Grave 2, Quarantine 2: Terminal, and Fright Night 2, all largely tangential direct-to-DVD sequels, as well as the planned 2015 Friday the 13th re-reboot, which I guess wouldn't even count. Only those sequels stand among the dozens of horror remakes that have been inflicted upon the world since the genre's Renaissance, kickstarted by 2003's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

It is a testament to how groundbreaking that film was that it received any sort of franchise connection at all, let alone a prequel with most of the same cast signed on to reprise their villainous roles. And thanks to the short hiatus between the two movies, the presence of Platinum Dunes at the helm, and the wild success of the remake, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning is actually the one film in the entire franchise to have more or less airtight continuity.

It's far from a masterpiece, but the fact that it doesn't require any mental acrobatics to clumsily shove Leatherface's daughter or Matthew McConaughey's Illuminati cyborg leg into the potential trajectory of a previous entry allows The Beginning to go down smooth as silk.

Or rough as steel wool, but we're talking about continuity, not content.

Set several years before the events of the remake (which was inexplicably set in the same year as the original), The Beginning takes place in 1969 during the height of the Vietnam war. Two sexy brothers, Dean (Taylor Handley of the under-appreciated gender-bending sci-fi-rom-com Zerophilia) and Eric (Matt Bomer, this film's requisite future celebrity), are taking a final road trip from LA to Florida before they ship out. Only thing is, Dean has no intention of following through, instead opting to dodge his way down to Mexico with his beautiful sexy girlfriend Bailey (Diora Baird).

After a car crash and a run-in with a man (R. Lee Ermey) impersonating the recently deceased Sheriff Hoyt (he passed away quietly in the road after a brief gunshot wound to the head), the kiddos are dragged away to a secluded home by the closed-down slaughterhouse. Left behind is Eric's girlfriend Chrissie (Jordana Brewster), who was thrown from the vehicle and hid in the bushes during the ordeal. Now she must find a way to save her friends from Hoyt, his cannibalistic family, and their enormous be-masked son who will soon find himself a relaxing hobby that leads to his new name - Leatherface (Andrew Bryniarski).

"Dusty Chainsaw Man" just doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

The best I can say about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning is that is is remarkably distinct from its predecessor - in equally good and bad measures. That which it improves upon is very much to my tastes, but its failures as a piece of cinema are certainly more numerous. But to start off, let's kick it into context with perhaps the single most important horror film of the 2000's - Saw. 

The effect of that grubby 2004 shocker and its cadre of sequels on the landscape of horror in the 21st century was immeasurable. Elaborate traps and unflinching gore sequences became all the rage in the likes of 2005's Hostel and Wolf Creek, among a spattering of others. This cinematic phenomenon was practically tailor-made for Platinum Dunes, who found that they could easily fit their newly viable Texas Chainsaw franchise into this generic model - which would become colloquially known as "torture porn."

The gore of the remake certainly made a strong statement, but in the post-Saw world the new slogan was "more is more." So The Beginning trotted out the big guns - a sexier cast (a feat I would have deemed impossible before seeing this film, but lo and behold - Platinum Dunes must have some kind of Stepford Wives jig going on), more grimy gore effects (including a disgusting birth sequence on the floor of a meat packing plant), more chainsaws, and - a first for the franchise as long as we're pretending TCM III doesn't exist - a heaping helping of traps and twisted games.

Trappier. Sexier. Matt Bomier.

Overall, it's much more grim and bleak, perhaps the most depressing entry in the franchise since the original, though it by no means has that film's raw power. But it comes into its own with some utterly strange moments of humor that I would be loathe to spoil here, should anyone actually be interested in watching it (and, no matter how inept some of them might be, a Texas Chainsaw movie is generally always worth a watch for the morbidly curious bad cinema connoisseur.)

Along with it's newfound post-Saw energy, The Beginning separates itself from the remake with a grubbier aesthetic, more closely matching the original's grainy, yellowed, and decrepit visual style, removing the slickness that covered that film in a too-glossy sheen. And the film is far more political, covering topics as far and wide as draft dodging in the Vietnam era, the dangers of blind patriotism, the economic decline of the early 70's, and the burgeoning biker and hippie movements as well as their tensions with the older generations.

It misses more than it hits, but The Beginning has its heart in the right place, spilling over the brim with thematic fervor. And the exploitation meter finally hits both genders equally as we get firsthand knowledge of just how hot Matt Bomer can be in any given situation.

Covered in blood.

Taking a swim.

Driving a car.

This is literally his first shot in the movie.

The perfect image to represent this film's incessant amorality and gleeful exploitation. But tell me - wouldn't you put on Matt Bomer's face if you got the chance?

So this is all fine and good, but the unfortunate fact remains that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning is a just plain average mid-2000's horror picture. Call the Texas Chainsaw movies anything you want (and I absolutely have), but they have never been average.

This film is saddled with a truly unfortunate plague of shaky cam that makes the whole thing feel like it was filmed in an earthquake, and just about every major character decision is the single dumbest possible outcome. I mean, for crying out loud, Dean burns his draft card in the car while he sits two feet behind his soldier brother and doesn't think that he'll notice. Next time you want to be discrete, maybe don't light a flame behind somebody's head in a moving vehicle.

And the cannibal family is utterly lackluster in this go-around. I've never been a big fan of Bryniarski's Leatherface, but he at least gets the job done. And R. Lee Ermey still pulls out all the stops as Sheriff Hoyt, but the weight of the entire film rests on his shoulders as the man who tries to convince his family to turn to cannibalism. He himself seems to have little to no motivation other than that he's just a big old psychopath. Yay prequels!

The fact that he is doing this against their will completely undermines the terror of the piece. Sure, a man trying to get his family to eat people would make a good feature on its own with more time to explore the psychology, but here it's hardly a subplot. If the family is resisting their urge to be evil, it's just not scary. I mean, I know it's supposed to be a prequel and all, but all this moral waffling gets in the way and even actively impedes what is a decidedly grotesque film.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning is noncommittal, and that's the worst sin a movie this grubby and exploitative could have committed. But it's still a competent film with some major improvements on the remake. Though its overall net worth ends up somewhat lower than its forefather, The Beginning is yet another in a surprising run of decent Platinum Dunes remakes and you won't catch me complaining about that.

TL;DR: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning improves on the remake in some aspects, but doesn't quite have the quality to back them up.

Rating: 6/10

Body Count: 11; Not including a cow that literally explodes when hit by a car.

1. Sloane dies in childbirth.
2. Meat Plant Owner is bludgeoned with a sledgehammer.
3. Sheriff Hoyt is shot in the head with a shotgun.
4. Alex is shot in the chest with a shotgun.
5. Holden is sliced in half with a chainsaw.
6. Eric is chainsawed in the stomach.
7. Bailey has her throat sliced with scissors.
8. Dean is chainsawed in the back.
9. Chrissie is chainsawed in the back.
10. Motorist is hit by Chrissie's car.
11. Police Officer is hit by Chrissie's car. 

Word Count: 1564

Reviews In This Series

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Hooper, 1986)

Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (Burr, 1990)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (Henkel, 1994)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Nispel, 2003)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (Liebesman, 2006)

Texas Chainsaw 3D (Luessenhop, 2013)
Leatherface (Bustillo & Maury, 2017)

Come Back To Texas

Year: 2003

Director: Marcus Nispel

Cast: Jessica Biel, Jonathan Tucker, Andrew Bryniarski

Run Time: 1 hour 38 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

In the past decade, the horror community has been inundated with remake after remake after remake. These types of films have always been around, even in the 50's and 60's and back, but since the mid-2000's there has been an overwhelming glut of the tepid things. Just on this blog, I've covered a small army of them including Carrie,  Evil Dead, Fright Night, The Last House on the Left, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Prom Night, and The Wizard of Gore, and there's easily ten times that amount on the market today.

With most cinematic movements, it's hard to tamp down a true ignition point. There tends to be several films around the same time that coalesce into the beginning of a new wave of filmmaking, like how the proto-slashers The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Black Christmas came out within weeks of one another in 1974. Luckily for us, the remake boom has one clear culprit.

In 2003, Michael Bay's new production company Platinum Dunes released their first of many many many low budget remakes - The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. As if you couldn't have guessed that already. 

I really shouldn't bury the lede in reviews where I stick the poster on the top.

The film was such a sterling success that other studios immediately hopped on the bandwagon and began pumping out updates on their long dormant horror franchises, prominent and obscure alike (and if anybody has any insider information on how the hell Mother's Day got remade, please contact me immediately). What most of them seemed to miss was the fact that Texas Chainsaw was actually pretty good.

But we're not here to talk about the tsunami of crappy remakes. We're here to discuss their pretty good progenitor and the influence it has - for better or for worse - over the narrative and aesthetic stylings of the ensuing decade.

The first of these is immediately apparent. Though the characters in this film have no obvious analogue with the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, they are exponentially more attractive. In fact, if we view beauty as the equation x=log2(3^10) with x being the proportional attractiveness of the current cast over the classic cast, the results would be math.

Sexy, sexy math.

Our Meat for the evening, and by any definition, the film doesn't view them as more than that, are Morgan (Jonathan Tucker, also from The Ruins), a sexy nerd-stoner who combines the most annoying traits of both stereotypes and whose every line of dialogue sounds like vomit dribbling from the gaping maw of a mad drunk; Andy (Mike Vogel, the sexy outlaw from Under the Dome), the sexy rebel - a real stretch, performance-wise; Pepper (Erica Leerhsen of Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2), a sexy hitchhiker whose thirst for Andy rivals Leatherface's thirst for blood; Kemper (Eric Balfour of the first episode of Buffy), the sexy hick with a chip on his shoulder; and Erin (Jessica Biel of The A-Team), the sexy girlfriend of said sexy hick - soon to be his sexy fiancée if he has anything to say about it.

The kiddos are driving through the countryside to a Skynyrd concert in Dallas. As if that wasn't tip-off enough, Texas Chainsaw is set in 1973, the same year as the original film. On their way they pick up another Hitchhiker (Lauren German), who blows her head off after shouting about her friends all dying. They pull off at the nearest gas station and are sent to a mill to await the Sheriff. As they wait and wait, they soon realize the nearby house will become their final resting place as Leatherface (Andrew Bryniarski), the Sheriff (R. Lee Ermey), and their family send them one by one to the basement workshop to be chainsaw massacred.

To be fair to them, how could this lovely home seem like there might be killers hiding inside?

The great thing about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is that it can be taken on its own. Its plot intersects with the plot of the original at so few points, it actually becomes a distinctly separate movie. This is greatly to its favor, because comparing any single horror film to Texas Chain Saw is like flinging spaghetti at a dartboard and hoping for a bull's eye.

And there are even some cases where the film - I wouldn't say "improves on," but it... extrapolates certain sequences from the Chain Saw structure to great effect. It is debatable whether this film's increase in gore improves the horror (I personally don't find it to do so - it's suitably disgusting and wet, but I find the whole film to be a little too slick to get under the skin), but something must be said for a girl watching a hulking killer attack while wearing her boyfriend's face. And a sequence with a meat hook and a piano is delightful in a sickening kind of way.

The film isn't afraid to up the ante and in today's world of anonymous studio horror, that is a quality to be much admired. Texas Chainsaw allows us to explore the entire deranged town, visit the nearby slaughterhouse, and see just how far gore prosthetic technology has come since the last entry in the franchise in 1994 (or 1997, once Matthew McConaughey got his way).

This gleeful excess is mirrored in the deliriously drippy and wet production design, which seems to have been inspired by that time I walked to class on a rainy day and forgot an umbrella. That or the filmmakers' fervent desire to keep Jessica Biel as soaking wet as possible. It's hilarious. No matter where she goes it rains on her, whether it be literal rain or the inexplicable flooding of Leatherface's workshop. At one point she manages to find a refuge but Leatherface triggers the fire sprinklers because the teen boys in the audience would likely implode if she spent one second without her sopping bosoms flapping about.

And yet this guy keeps his shirt on. Wasteful.

Joke all I might, I do enjoy my share of needlessly exploitative horror. It's always delightful to watch the filmmakers' obvious desperation to sexify even the most harrowing of scenarios. There's enough hot dudes around to not feel particularly misogynistic. But let me expound my theories on sexuality and exploitation in its own essay, I don't want to bog down this post like so much rainwater.

Here comes the part in the positive reviews where I dump all the negative things I have to say. Because, succeed as it might in distancing itself from Texas Chain Saw, this film is a remake and is thus beholden to comparisons. I've already mentioned the movie's distancing slickness, but the cold grey "gritty" aesthetic just doesn't do it for me in terms of this franchise's narrative universe. I associate Texas Chainsaw with oppressive heat and claustrophobia and that is just not the feeling this film gives off.

It's altogether shallow, and the film follows suit. Gone are the first films intensely angry political sentiments. It's understandable. 2003 was a wildly different societal climate than 1974, though the original time period has been needlessly retained (in fact, Erin's irritating moralizing stances, the fashion, and speech patterns actively disagree with the time period). 

There's more gore but less personality, and it's not necessarily a lesser movie because of it. It has different aims than the decades-gone original. But it's certainly a more superficial one.

But in spite of these shortcomings, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is certainly worth its salt. Its ability to be genuinely tense and creative paved the way for the battalions of remakes to come. Unfortunately but predictably, other studios followed the route of "slick and grey is cool" rather than "good horror movies make money" but what are you gonna do?

Watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The rest, as they say, is history. Let it confine itself to the books while you enjoy one of the most interesting reboots modern cinema has to offer.

TL;DR: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is obviously not as good as the original, but is wonderfully intense and fast-paced.

Rating: 7/10

Body Count: 8

1. The Hitchhiker shoots herself through the head.
2. Kemper is hit in the head with a sledgehammer.
3. Pepper is sliced with a chainsaw.
4. Andy has his leg sliced off, is hung on a meathook, and stabbed in the chest.
5. Morgan is hung on a chandelier and chainsawed in the crotch.
6. Sheriff Hoyt is run over with a police car. 
7. Officer #1 is killed with a chainsaw offscreen.
8. Officer #2 is killed with a chainsaw offscreen. 

Word Count: 1449

Reviews In This Series

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Hooper, 1986)
Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (Burr, 1990)
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (Henkel, 1994)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Nispel, 2003)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (Liebesman, 2006)
Texas Chainsaw 3D (Luessenhop, 2013)
Leatherface (Bustillo & Maury, 2017)