Film Review: Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning @ Empire Theatres—Capitol 7
A movie featuring a montage of disfigured portraits, the obscured silhouette of a young child hacking apart a dead dog, footage of self-inflicted plastic surgery and the wonder years of Leatherface can only signal one thing: you’re in for a bloodbath.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning is a prequel to the 2003 adventures of Leatherface and his cannibalistic family, itself a glitzy remake of the original 1974 horror classic. Sicker, filthier and chock full of nasty, this film attempts to gross out its audience at every turn. Depending on how delicate your stomach is, it might succeed.
The film is set in the southern United States in 1969. Two friends, Dean (Taylor Handley) and Eric (Matthew Bomer) have been drafted to fight in Vietnam. With their girlfriends Chrissie (Jordana Brewster) and Bailey (Diora Baird), the group packs up and drives towards the pick-up point. While coasting through the desolate Texan countryside, the teens get into a car accident, leaving them alive but badly injured. To the teens’ misfortune, the only person who comes to help is the completely insane Sheriff, who brings three of them home. At the Sheriff’s house, his deranged son Thomas Hewitt—
a.k.a. Leatherface—prepares to torture the three victims before gutting and serving them to his family for dinner. As the only one who escapes, Chrissie tries to save her friends before they’re turned into ragout.
Judged in isolation, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning is a decent gross-out slasher flick, but doesn’t fare so well as a prequel—the film offers little in of possible explanations or even hints at the origins of the sequel’s carnage. The insane Sheriff in the 2003 sequel is revealed to have been Papa Hewitt dressed in a murdered cop’s uniform, and Leatherface’s homicidal tendencies turn out to be the result of a disturbed youth, filled with ridicule due to his facial deformities. Unfortunately, these themes and developments are quickly abandoned after the movie’s opening—there are five minutes of “the beginning,” and another 79 of “the massacre.” The film focuses far too much on the killings rather than explaining the Hewitts’ taste for human flesh.
The movie is quite predictable and not much should be expected in of innovation: it features jumpy editing and loud noises without any more sophisticated psychological horror. But if you’ve got a sadistic appetite for blood, it’s slopped liberally all over the screen.
In scene after scene, director Jonathan Liebesman piles on the senseless, messy violence. Just when you’re hoping the camera will cut away, it zooms in on the sinewy gore. From peeled-off faces to fountains of blood pouring from severed limbs, this film has got to be one of the bloodiest of the season. Liebesman and his effects team make excellent use of modern technology, with horrifically realistic wounds and raw, gurgling sound effects that give you that warm, fuzzy feeling—I think it’s called nausea.
Of course, even the best effects still need good screamers to make their scenes truly disturbing, and Liebesman has several in his cast. The actors convincingly develop their characters within the limits of the horror archetypes, from Handley’s shy, sensitive Dean to Baird’s ditzy Bailey. Jordana Brewster makes excellent use of her screen time as the resourceful protagonist—Chrissie is believably scared, yet at the same time communicates a strong, caring persona. When faced with the decision to flee and survive or risk her life to save her friends, Brewster’s facial expression and movement successfully and realistically show Chrissie’s internal conflict.
Despite the rest of the cast’s solid efforts toward character development, Sheldon Turner’s screenplay shortchanges them by paying much more attention to converging plotlines and how to get people killed off.
So what great lessons does The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning teach us? We discovered that bullying is bad, the southern United States should be avoided (particularly desolate farmhouses), and you should never, ever get into a car accident. Also, I think we’ve all learned that we should be tender with people, because society makes monsters.
Maybe all Leatherface needs is a big hug, and hopefully then we can stop the prequel/sequel/remake madness.
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