The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

I was not too excited when I heard that there was going to be a remake of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.  It wasn't for the normal reasons I have, which is the fact that too many movies that I grew up with got remade in the 2000s.  This was at the beginning of that trend and, down the road, they started remaking things that came out when I was a kid.  I still wasn't that old at the time - barely in my 30s - so it was weird to have a remake of a movie I could buy on DVD quite easily and it be even better quality than when I originally saw it.  

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, though, was an outlier.  It came out when I was two years old so, other than as a horror fan later in life, it was not a big influence on me growing up.  In fact, it was quite difficult to find, and it took me a bit of time in the early 1990s to find a copy to watch.  That has changed as it has gone through a number of quality re-releases, but there were some shady things that went on with its original distribution that kind of held up getting decent copies in rental stores.  

There was also the fact that the original movie is a bit of an experience.  It's not something I put on for fun like A Nightmare on Elm Street or Halloween.  It's a movie that, as I have said in my review of it, one can practically feel and smell, and none of it is pleasant.  Tobe Hooper meant it to be a PG horror film and, despite his goal, came out with something truly disturbing by accident.  The only director who has been able to almost achieve the same thing on purpose is Rob Zombie with The Devil's Rejects, and on that end only for about the first half.  Even Hooper, when he made The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, didn't try to achieve the same atmosphere of the original, instead going for a bizarre, garish comedy. 

Marcus Nispel was talked into doing the remake by the cinematographer of the original, Daniel Pearl, as he was reluctant to even touch this movie.  Scott Kosar, in writing the remake, used the original more as a guide than anything else, opting instead of the bizarre sensory assault of the original to go for pure hixploitation combined with an average slasher plot.  In this way he managed to at least do better than some of the sequels to the original, but that's not saying much.

Kemper (Eric Balfour), his girlfriend Erin (Jessica Biel), their friends Morgan (Jonathan Tucker) and Andy (Mike Vogel) and a traveling companion named Pepper (Erica Leerhson) are on their way to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert in Dallas.  About three hours from their destination they pick up a girl wandering a country road (Lauren German) who appears shellshocked.  When they start heading toward the nearest town, she panics, produces a gun and shoots herself.

Not knowing what to do or how to handle the body they try to find the local sheriff (R. Lee Ermy), who turns out to be none too friendly nor compassionate about the death of the girl.  It also turns out that what the girl was running from was a family called the Hewitts, of whom one is a boy named Thomas (Andrew Bryniarski) who has a rare skin disease as well as a diminished mental capacity.  He is still rather strong and has a penchant for murdering people and making new faces for himself from theirs as well as art projects from their corpses.  Known also as Leatherface, he is soon after the kids, taking them down one by one as they try to escape. 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre doesn't have any outright nudity despite having a sex scene.  It is also quite bloody in comparison to the original which went out of its way to not be graphic.  The opening scenes are quite creative and R. Lee Ermy manages to be creepier than Leatherface, who Andrew Bryniarski plays well.  Not as well as Gunnar Hansen, but well enough.  What is missed is the rest of the original family as well as the fact that they were murdering people to eat them and sell what they didn't to people passing through as barbecue.  That dark sense of humor helped to lighten the original in places, and it is sorely missed here.  Also, whether or not Leatherface and his extended family are cannibals is left rather vague, as there is nothing along the lines of the dinner scene from the original.

That is the ultimate disappointment with this version.  It's not bad, there are plenty of good scenes and it doesn't seem as hollow or soulless as many of the other remakes that came after it.  It is shot well, particularly the steel-grey skies above the Hewitt residence, which in this looks like a brutalist McMansion.  It's even set in 1973.  But, in the end, it's taking what was one of the most unique movies of the 1970s and whittling it down to a rote slasher film, where Leatherface could be any masked killer, as the leads could be any group of interchangeable teens. 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

Time: 98 minutes

Starring: Jessica Biel, Eric Balfour, R. Lee Ermy, Anfrew Bryniarski

Director: Marcus Nispel