Hey, folks. We're back again. Not much to say this time around. It's been a hectic week for me both in and out of CHUD, but I do plan on collapsing later on the evening... so that's always nice. Keep sending me your ideas as well as your letters and comments for the various pieces we've been running. I'll run those. I swear!

And now...

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Massacre
By Charlie Brigden (Fett)
Member since 12/27/01
Student Filmmaker in Bristol, UK
Born 8/11/78

I’ll be honest right now. I’m probably not the most objective person to talk about this. But hey, if I were, I probably wouldn’t have written this article.

First, a little history.

I’m a huge fan of horror, and of the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I saw it when I was five, loved it then, and as I’ve got older, I’ve come to recognize it as not only a horror classic, but also an American classic. Like Dawn of the Dead, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Exorcist, this flick transcends the horror genre and stands proudly in the pantheon of great movies.

So what was the point of remaking it?

As everyone knows, in 2003 Michael Bay’s production company remade, or reinvented, or reimagined or whatever the fuck you want to call it, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Like the Dawn of the Dead remake, it was greeted with a lot of positive feedback, both from horror fans and the mainstream. And like Dawn of the Dead, it was a movie that really didn’t need to be made.

I’m not going to spend a long time talking about the nature of remaking movies and whether or not they should be remade, because that’s done to death. I’m more here to discuss remakes that have pretty much been a waste of time and money, remakes that are pretty futile to begin with but somehow get worse when you actually watch them. If I’m honest, I enjoyed the Dawn remake. But my big problem with it is also a problem with TCM 2003, namely the fact that both movies were remade not because of the film preceding it, but because of a cash-in on their brand.

Michael Bay said himself in an interview that he wanted to remake TCM for one reason: because of the name recognition. Because of the notoriety of the brand. And it shows. Dawn was a similar story. The movie bore barely any relation to the original, aside from the name and the setting. It was also a big dumb action flick that had none of the humour or depth that Romero’s flick had. Which made the ‘based on the screenplay by George Romero’ credit all the more baffling. Don’t get me wrong, I liked it as a brainless zombie movie, it just had no business being called Dawn of the Dead. But The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2003... that headed into worst-case scenario territory.

TCM 2003 sets its tone in the first ten minutes. That can be summed up in one word: cliché. It’s no surprise really, with Michael Bay heavily involved, but it really does fit into the slasher conventions incredibly quickly. The first thing we see inside the van carrying the kids is two kids making out heavily. We find out one of the kids was a girl they picked up hitchhiking a day earlier. So, she’s immediately painted as a whore. After that, we discover that not only are the kids smoking pot, they’re also smuggling it. The original movie had kids travelling to this town to see if their grandparents’ graves had been dug up, after reports of grave robbing in the area. No drugs, no sex, they were just on their way to do something. Here, we have a bunch of horny kids smuggling drugs and on their way to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. This immediately brings up the conclusion that the film kills any chance we had of feeling any sympathy for these characters, and outlines the moral ideology of the movie: that these kids deserve what they get. But then again, this is a man who said Hollywood movies were too gratuitously violent and then made Bad Boys II.

For a horror movie, the film is amazingly non-horrific. One scene we are treated to early is a girl blowing her brains out. But it’s executed so remarkably mundanely that we just look at the screen and, Like Willem Dafoe at the end of Spider-Man, just say ‘Oh.’ And of course, we are treated to a shot which tracks back from the frightened passengers through the hole in her head. This is an utterly stupid - and Hollywood - approach for a movie like this. This is supposed to be a movie about PURE TERROR. It shouldn’t be flashy glossy nonsense. But it is. The shot through the body cavity trick is a move that only a few directors can pull off, and certainly not in a film with the motives TCM 2003 supposedly has. I remember Sam Raimi did it in The Quick and the Dead, a movie that was purposely completely over the top, and seeing Gene Hackman through a hole in Keith David’s head was pretty damn funny. But that’s because of the tone of the film. But then, Marcus Nispel is no Sam Raimi.

The movies promises horror at every turn but does it in such a toothless way that it’s all bark and no bite. The introduction of Leatherface is a shadowy scene in a basement lit very darkly, obviously emphasising the mystery of the character. The original showed us that you don’t need to light the scenes darkly, because the horror of the situation, especially through Bob Burns’ production design, was there clear as day. The first time we saw Leatherface, it was for a split second, but he was shot in harsh light and we saw that mask as clearly as possible. Here, the scene that introduces him is much more reminiscent of the opening credits of A Nightmare On Elm Street, with Freddy making his glove. It’s nicely done, but again fits in with the philosophy of the flick. We all told that this is all very scary, but there’s nothing to back it up on screen.

But then, the treatment of Leatherface, and indeed the family, is pretty much a personification of what’s wrong with this movie. The first scene of Leatherface revving up his chainsaw and going after the kiddies is completely telegraphed. We know Leatherface is watching the kids, we know the retard in the wheelchair (an utterly stupid character devised only to say things like ‘You’re so dead you don’t even know it") is banging on the floor to call him, and it renders the scene completely and utterly devoid of tension and horror. Neutered. It would actually be a perfect example of comparing how to do a great death scene, and how not to if you put the original and the remake side by side. In the original, Kirk goes into the house, walks towards the metal door and is immediately taken out with no warning. There’s no Norman Bates-ish scene of Leatherface looking through peepholes, it’s just there, bang. Totally different.

Leatherface himself is again, neutered. Firstly, he takes off his mask. Aside from the fact that he looks like Jason Voorhees under that thing, the one thing that you do not do in a film like this is take the fucking mask off, especially halfway through the movie. It completely takes the power of the character away. Although in a completely different context, the ending of Return of the Jedi is a good comparison. Here we have Darth Vader, an iconic villain who just oozes menace, is turned from this monster into Anakin Skywalker, who as Hooper X in Chasing Amy puts it, ‘a crusty old white man.’ As I said, it’s a different context, but it does take away the power of the character. Which fits in JEDI, because that’s what the scene is all about, but here? Doesn’t work.

Especially when we find out he wears the masks because he has a skin disease.

I mean, come on. What’s creepier – a guy who wears human skin masks because he has a skin disease, or a guy who wears human skin masks because he likes to wear human skin masks? This is more of them trying to explain everything. Leatherface has always been a retard who has been brought up literally on blood. He not only likes it, he also wears the masks to fit in with the missing mother figure that the family doesn’t have, adding a layer to Hooper’s comment on the American family. Also, it’s notable that the character was partly based on Ed Gein, the non-chainsawing but still very creepy murderer/graverobber who used to wear skin masks to emulate his mother (obviously, also the inspiration for Psycho). That’s reality. Life is fucked up. People are fucked up. We don’t need to be given justification for the character.

Of course, the whole comment on American myth, the family, etc is lost along with the whole cannibalism aspect. No one’s eating human flesh here. Why? Who knows, although I’m sure a bit off the flank of Jessica Biel must be pretty tasty. We’re told Leatherface was a butcher at some point, but there’s none of the depth of Hooper and Henkel’s original myth, of how the family were all slaughterhouse workers put out of business by machinery, another comment on technology affecting the workplace economy. And please, don’t tell me I’m reading too much into it and seeing something that isn’t there, cause folks, it is there. If you don’t care for that kind of thing, then maybe this is your movie.

The one good point of this movie is the cinematography, and even then, it doesn’t quite fit. It’s by Daniel Pearl, Director of Photography for the original movie, and while it does look beautiful at times, it just looks too, well, clean. The original has this great lo-fi quality (I think it was shot on 16mm) where it looks grainy, almost cinema verité I guess, and really fucking grimy. Dirty. Like the movie. Here, it’s glossy. Like a Hollywood movie. It also leads into a point I often have about people wanting perfect digital 16x9 transfers of movies like New York Ripper. These movies are usually dirty and sick and the whole thing of watching them on an old VHS or a grainy transfer really enhances the experience. It’s like you’re watching a snuff movie almost. But, I’m sure a lot of people will disagree with me.

At the end of the day, this is a cautionary tale, of revisiting something that did not need to be revisited. The original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is very much a product of its time. Vietnam, the oil crisis, Watergate, etc etc. All those elements of society had an effect, and they help the film to be absolutely brutal. It’s not there to entertain you, and while it does have depth and subtext, that’s exactly what it is: subtext. The film’s primary agenda is to attack you, to assault you, to leave you as psychologically damaged as the victims in the film. And it succeeds. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2003 is an exercise in cynical Hollywood profit-making. I really don’t know if it’s helped people seek out the original. That’s always one thing people say to defend remakes, although I only know like one person who sought out Dawn of the Dead after hating the remake. And they loved it, which is cool.

And sure, when it's all said and done, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre will always still exist. There’s a copy in the Museum of Modern Art, which says something.

The remake will exist too. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.