What do you get when you watch a rehash of a remake? The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. Truly lacking in originality, this prequel to the 2003 remake is everything that its predecessor was not: plodding, uninspired, gratuitously violent and just all-around disgusting. That's not to say that the two films -- and, in fact, the 1974 masterpiece that started it all -- do not share some of these qualities, which in some measures can prove effective. But TCM: The Beginning stands out more as an example of the current trend in horror -- unrelenting and not frightening brutality -- rather than the next-gen installment of a more than 30 year-old franchise.
The film follows the increasingly formulaic tradition of horror movies made at New Line where the villains rather than the victims are the focal point of the story. As with Freddy in the Nightmare on Elm Street series or Death itself in the Final Destination films, the storytellers are far less interested in who inhabits the "innocent" roles than what can later be done (via the bad guy) with their still-warm bodies. In fact, this prequel might better have been titled The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Motivations For Doing Stuff, since the dialogue serves to overly explain why the killers, victims and even passersby are performing their designated tasks.
However, their actual motivations are almost completely unimportant: Jordana Brewster, Diora Baird, Matthew Bomer and Taylor Handley are the intended victims. R. Lee Ermey, Terrance Evans and Marietta March are the facilitators of their demise. And as Leatherface, Andrew Bryniarski is the big, blunt instrument that brings all of them together. The time is 1969, five years before the first film happened, though the art director seems to have taken this as a cue to fulfill only the demands of current fashion trends; these are not people who look or sound like anyone but the hottest young stars this side of West Hollywood. Subsequently, beautiful heads are bashed in, bodies are chopped up, and friends and family are dismembered.
The initial problem with the movie is that it is structured almost identically to the original film, which makes it a copy of a copy. Clever though it may have outwardly seemed, enlisting John Laroquette to deliver a straight-faced introduction does not accomplish more than reminding the audience that they're watching a sequel, and a particularly derivative one at that. But "explaining" Leatherface was a bad decision in the first film, and expanding that background to include his kin is a catastrophic miscalculation this time around. Rather than seeing them as creepy, inhuman monsters, they're perceived as savvy bumpkins -- the kind of back woods folk who are not only well-versed in what city slickers do and think, but evidently know how to creep around with the precise timing of, well, crazed horror movie murderers.
In addition, the film relies on a convergence of some highly improbable circumstances. The reason the kids find themselves in dire straits is not because they screw each other (per the rules of most slasher movies) or otherwise mouth off to the wrong person, but because they are being robbed by a lone female biker when they run into a cow with their jeep and crash spectacularly. Screenwriter Sheldon Turner adds insult to injury when he makes the "victims," and in particular Brewster's character, dumber than just about any horror heroine in the genre's history. Whether he felt that these characters were comparatively inexperienced since the film was set in '69 or just assumed audiences wouldn't mind that Brewster was dumb as a post, he does the film a disservice by creating characters who are only victims -- i.e. so unsympathetic we don't care whether they live or die.
Ultimately, the film's biggest problem is not its story or characters, but rather its concession to the style of horror movies on the market today. Its predecessor arrived at a time when the truly gross movies weren't being made; since then the likes of Hostel and The Hills Have Eyes have come out -- two films of an increasing number that focus on the blood and guts rather than scaring the crap out of a crowd. Turner and director Jonathan Liebesman try to raise the bar -- or lower it depending on your point of view -- by documenting the brutality, and all but forgoing the truly frightening moments. So while those punctuative riffs from the first film may have returned to accent certain scary scenes, they feel forced, and ultimately, false when exploited here.
Of course, if you want to get sick while watching a movie or vicariously suffer the tortures of the damned, then this might be the film for you. But if you do want to see those things, you've probably already caught them in the aforementioned movies, or even Jackass: Number Two, which at least leavens the discomfort with humor. There is truly nothing to enjoy about Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, from its disappointingly unoriginal opening to the absurdly violent, equally disappointing cop-out ending. And honestly, if you're going to make a movie about cannibals, at least have the decency not to cannibalize yourself in the process -- especially when all of the really meaty parts were already used up the first time around.
