Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on October 17, 2003, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Ahem. Tap tap. Is this thing on? OK, then…
I think the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a scarier film than Tobe Hooper’s original.
Don’t everyone throw the rocks and bottles at once.
The fright factor is something you can’t fake when you watch a movie; you either feel it or you don’t. And as much as I can appreciate the raw atmosphere of Hooper’s movie, I’ve never found it very scary. Not when I first saw it on a big-screen rerelease as a teenager, not on subsequent viewings of the landmark restored laserdisc. I do respect its influence on the genre and its sizable following, many of whom objected to the idea of this remake both on general principles and for specific reasons. And yet…while the new Chainsaw is a remake of a horror classic, so was John Carpenter’s The Thing. Director Marcus Nispel’s experience is in the music-video world, but so was David Fincher’s before he did Se7en. And while the lead actors are attractive TV faces, what’s wrong with hiring a cast with a little experience under their belts? (When slasher diehards decry the hiring of telegenic young performers in the subgenre’s modern entries, I’ve come to think, “Sure, as opposed to the ugly Shakespearean actors who appeared in the ’70s/early-‘80s slasher films, right?”)
I admit that I too object to cinematic reduxes in general, but also that my low expectations have been subverted before—most recently by The Ring, and now by the new Chainsaw. Love the original or not, genre fans should find that Nispel and co. have pulled off a movie that plunges into the depths of horrific depravity without apology, and generates a good share of skin-crawling dread. It replicates the tone and basics of the original while wringing new twists out of the material that, for the most part, work. And it joins the growing parade of movies bringing ’70s-style down-and-dirty horror back to big screens, which can only be a good thing.
As in the ’74 film, this Chainsaw opens with a quintet of young people on a road trip stopping their van to pick up a hitchhiker. This time, though, they pick up not a leering psycho but a terrified young woman, fleeing from something clearly dreadful. This alteration, its payoff and the way it leads the protagonists into danger are among the tweaks in Scott Kosar’s well-judged script that keep this movie from seeming like a mere rehash. And while the characters occasionally do the dumb things almost required of would-be victims in these movies, Nispel, Kosar and the cast make it as plausible as possible that these kids hang around the area, even as it becomes clear to the audience that there’s danger lurking.
The greatest agent of said peril, of course, is Leatherface, who first crashes the scene in a well-timed jolt that should leave fans with a knowing smile of recognition once they’ve come back down into their seats. In the wordless role, Andrew Bryniarski imparts a truly threatening physicality, well-balanced by R. Lee Ermey’s patented brand of authority-figure menace as a local sheriff who is clearly not on the side of the law. To their credit, Nispel and Kosar clearly know that the audience will know that all the characters the youths encounter will be suspect, and go for suspense based not on the question of which of them are up to no good, but of who will survive and what will be left etc.
The five leads oblige by contributing no-holds-barred portrayals of fear, panic and teary physical breakdown (there’s almost as much mucus on view here as blood). Jessica Biel, as most-likely-to-survive Erin, really throws herself into her increasingly desperate part in a manner that should make her TV fans forget all about 7th Heaven. Beyond the fact that her blood-streaked clothes become magically cleaned up midway through the third act, her descent into disheveled survivor mode is most persuasive. The other actors—Six Feet Under’s Eric Balfour, Blair Witch 2’s Erica Leerhsen, Jonathan Tucker and Mike Vogel—create an easy camaraderie in their early moments before becoming convincingly stressed as the story goes on.
Nispel proves to have the right directorial instincts for the material, building effective suspense and resorting to MTV fast cutting only when trying to mirror the disorientation of the characters, keeping the mayhem direct, brutal and nasty without becoming sadistic. Some fans might miss the undercurrent of black humor from Hooper’s approach; beyond a glimpse of a recognizable (and, in this context, probably inevitable) severed head, there are few attempts at dark laughs here. But if that’s the price to be paid for a commitment to straightforward, un-self-conscious terror, so be it. Returning from the original with more money and means at his disposal, cinematographer Daniel C. Pearl drains the bolder colors from the picture (though not so much that the stylized palette becomes a distraction), efficiently evoking rural desolation and dissolution. His moody lighting complements Greg Blair’s seedy production design, and Scott Stoddard’s grisly, well-wrought makeup FX are given sufficient emphasis to work in a realistic context, rather than as the point of the scenes. The result: You can truly feel the characters’ pain.
Still, the movie ain’t perfect; I could have done without the glimpse of Leatherface’s disease-ravaged, CGI-enhanced features (he’s scary in part because you don’t know what’s behind the mask), the little kid who leads the characters toward safety at a crucial moment and the framing device borrowed from a more recent low-budget horror sensation. On the other hand, the fact that John Larroquette was brought back to narrate the opening and closing, just as he did on the original at the beginning of his career, bespeaks this film’s creators’ honest ambitions to honor Hooper’s movie, to create a worthy retelling instead of simply exploiting the title. Even the many people who were more terrified by the first Chainsaw than I was are likely to find this one a worthy and effective update.
