THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE BEGINNING
(one and a half stars)
Slaughterhouse jive.
Running time: 84 minutes. Rated R (extreme graphic violence, profanity, sexuality. At the E-Walk, the Orpheum, the Kips Bay, others.
YOU can have your Minnesota Weed- Whacker Incident, your Delaware Leaf Blower Mishap. I’ll take the original “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” the scariest slasher movie since “Psycho.” The latest “Chainsaw,” though, is a dreary prequel that lacks buzz.
“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning” misses everything that made the first one eat into your spine like meningitis. Backing things up to 1969, the movie presents four USDA prime victims – two girls and two boys muttering about how they’re going to drive to Mexico to save the guys from the draft, as though we cared. They’re played by three actors you’ve never heard of and Jordana Brewster’s butt.
Evidently her backside has a better agent than the rest of her, because the only purpose her face has is to glance rearward to grimace at her wriggling moneymaker as it squirms around the film. Occasionally it flashes us a vertical smile.
The movie, which doesn’t even line up with the incomparable original but with the lame 2003 remake, tells how Leatherface got started – he was an ugly Leatherkid forced to wear a mask to cover a birth defect, and also a Leatherbaby who dropped unexpectedly out of his mom as she worked in a meatpacking plant. He’s rescued by a crazy lady who lives with a psychotic in a stolen sheriff’s outfit played by R. Lee Ermey, the drill instructor who taught us about the reacharound in “Full Metal Jacket.”
As for the motive behind the rage, the movie is so full of prattle about the economy (a headline flashes, “HUNDREDS LEFT JOBLESS”) and the war that I was waiting for Leatherface to reveal he was actually Howard Dean.
Like Dean, the movie trips itself. After the evil sheriff stuffs a corpse in the front seat and tells others to get in back, one of them chirps, “Is having a dead biker chick ride shotgun proper police procedure, Sir?” Whimsical dialogue means the character can’t really be scared, and if the character isn’t, the audience won’t be. Not long after this point, when the bad guys started wandering offscreen so the innocents could escape their bonds and stretch the story out a bit, the theater where I was sitting began to light up with iPods and cellphones, beacons of the bored.
The original, which presented itself as a true story and seemed real because of its plain documentary style, was scary because of everything it didn’t have: cheap bursts of “scary” loud music when there’s not much going on, characters talking nonsense or telling us stuff we already know. Really, why must one character ask another, “Are you OK? ARE YOU OK???” when the person under questioning is plainly knee deep in a bear trap?
Not that there isn’t a lot missing from this one: Why no corporate sponsorships, for instance? Did no one think to offer Black & Decker some product placement? What it most lacks, though, is some truly tasty cuts of meat for Leatherface. If the film actually expected the nation to cheer every time someone gets a chain saw through the rib cage, its quartet of victims should have been played by David Blaine, Jonathan Safran Foer, Rosie O’Donnell and Madonna.