Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning

I can hardly believe I rented Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. I liked the remake, and I liked the original, so I thought I would give this one a try. After all, it has Jordana Brewster in it, and I’ve liked her since The Faculty. Ugh. It wasn’t much to speak of, and brought nothing new to anything.

In TCM: TB, we see that the Hewitt family is in trouble. The meatpacking plant where they and Leatherface worked is closing down. The family faces starvation, and since they are obviously backwoods hicks with several screws loose, they follow right along when the head of the family kills off the sheriff of the town and serves him up as dinner. A trend is born, more or less, and old Leatherface gets to keep on doing what he is doing. This time, the first time, he gets to do it to a couple of brothers and their girlfriends on their last trip before shipping off to Vietnam. The four are appropriately pretty and very, very 70’s. Blood and guts follows, and madness ensues.

Diora Baird does a better job than I expected, since all I have seen her in before was some bit parts in movies and a Playboy photo spread. She does bring a bit more to the part than just a pretty face. She is terrified and stupefied in just the right moments. Jordana Brewster also does a good job being the plucky heroine who preservers and tries to kick butt. R. Lee Ermey is the nutso head of the family, but pretty much plays the same part he always plays: the loud, mean, crazy leader. Leatherface is just one big old lunk hauling around a chainsaw. He isn’t scary; he’s just sad and deformed.

I really hate the trend I have seen lately in horror films. There’s little plot and mostly just guts. There was no reason for this film except to show a bunch of people getting gutted and tortured. Now, I am not opposed to blood and guts. Giallo films are chocked full of it. Jason chops people in half all of the time. Honestly, I really don’t know why I disliked this movie so much. Maybe I am just tired of rampant blood and torture; maybe it’s just that there was no excuse for this movie anyway. Or maybe it was the fact that I am very, very tired of Texas always being the place where people are portrayed as backwards hicks who breed with their families, raise deformed serial killers, and scream crazy religious crap to terrorize sexy teenagers. Regardless, this movie was a waste of time, and for me to say that, you know it’s got to be bad.

Rating: 3 Hisses, for all the crazy backwards Texans and chainsaws up the gut and 1 Purr for Jordana Brewster and Diora Baird for playing sexy 70’s chickies and rising above the ickiness of this movie