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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) - Marcus Nispel

The most licentious shot in recent memory comes from director Marcus Nispel and producer Michael Bay in the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: As a hitchhiker shoots a gun into her mouth, Nispel trails the bullet's path from the chamber, into her mouth, through the hole in her brain and out through the blood-splattered back window. This is not obscene because it's disgusting; it's obscene because there's no real reason for it. Is this hole in her brain a surrealist attempt to peer into the subconscious? Or is it just something Marcus Nispel saw Sam Raimi do in The Quick and the Dead (a send-up of Western shootouts) and thought would be cool to do in his horror movie? Considering this and several other derivative shots (the camera being dropped during some Blair Witch-style grainy footage, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2's power tool crotch shot and The Silence of the Lambs's skin mask among them), the evidence suggests the latter.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre sits in theaters right next to Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino's controversial ultra-bloody samurai movie. The key question in that debate is whether Bill has enough artistic merit to elevate it above obscenity, but you can't ask that about Massacre: This exploitation piece has no artistic ambition. In fact, the Massacre remake labors to de-aestheticize itself. The new screenplay is cleansed of the layers of subtext and suggestion that marked the original as a masterpiece of horror, instead working very, very hard to gross out teenagers. To this end, the remake occassionally succeeds in eliciting gasps, but they're nothing but pure shock; the emotions do not lie in dread and existential horror, but only in momentary repulsion or the body's reaction to loud noise.

The original Massacre is the story of Sally, her boyfriend Jerry, her friends Pam and Kirk and her brother Franklin, who uses a wheelchair. The siblings are searching for their grandfather's grave, which they think has been vandalized. While in the area, they revisit their childhood home — outside of which vandals are, literally, digging up the past. Sally and the gang aren't particularly likable, especially the pain-in-the-ass Franklin, though his pouting is somewhat understandable because of his sister's annoyance with him. Sally wanders through their childhood home with her boyfriend, reliving memories of the past, but as she most likely did as a kid, leaves Franklin forlorn downstairs, upset and lonely. You can feel the punishment coming; the gang's retribution at the hands of Leatherface could easily be read, on one level, as the punishment wrought by the freaks on the cool kids. Yet, considering the film's allusions to the Manson murders, Leatherface could just as easily represent the rejection of moral reasoning in a time of social upheaval.

Compare this to the slaughter of the remake's gang of teenagers. First off, these are not '70s teenagers; they are Gap Models masquerading as hippies, especially the boyfriend character, with his faux mechanic's shirt, machine-frayed baseball cap and great abs. These kids are on their way to get high at a Skynyrd concert, not delving into the psyche of scarring childhood memories. There's some generic relationship plot, but the story is so varnished that the film loses the raw energy of the original. These kids are all right — other than just having a good time, they've done nothing wrong except to be cool in ways the current teenage audience might find cool. But because good horror villains always represent the dark side of the attacked, what's left here for Leatherface? Jessica Biel's character is the most moral in the movie, so why her friend must be crucified for her sins on a meathook is beyond comprehension ("Please forgive me," he says while dripping blood on her head). Upon closer reading, the image makes no sense, and the details of the gore (including the crucified playing the piano with his toes) just feels all the more exploitative.

As for that hitchiker, Nispel suggests something appropriately sinister: The girl is bloody in the crotch and obviously distraught. But Nispel doesn't deal with the rape image he himself brings up. This should be something weighty and horrible, but the subsequent suicide is merely a vehicle for an extended side plot involving the cleaning of blood and brains from automobile upholstery. In addition to Nispel's brain-hole shot, there are funny but empty attempts at black humor when R. Lee Ermey (as the crazy local sheriff) makes the boys help him wrap the body in Reynolds Wrap, and when the body is tossed around for a humorous "thud" sound. Contrast this with the hitchhiker in the original, who cuts his own hand and cries with something between pain and joy. It turns out that this guy is completely numb from working in the slaughterhouse; this scene carries on for several tense minutes before he cuts himself, which creates more tension in that little cut and in the entire mess created by the gunshot girl.

In fact, the hitchhiker's slaughterhouse story is the key to the first film. Not only does it set a queasy tone for the whole film, but it lets director Tobe Hooper comment on the mass violence buried underneath mass consumerism. When they pick up the hitchiker, he talks about having spent his life firing bolts into cattle brains to the point that he's totally desensitized — slicing his hand is an attepmt to simply feel something. The kids, recognizing that he has no chance of re-entering normal society, dumped the hitchhiker by the side of the road; combine that with his fatigues, and it's easy to see that Hooper is evoking the situtation of young Vietnam veterans who witnessed mass killing, only to be rejected by society at large.

Compare this to the plot of the remake, which jettisons the slaughterhouse conversation in the van for a party atmosphere. The kids are on their way to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert with a piñata full of pot and a sexy, slutty stranger in tow — hippie behavior for sure, but without the framing of the original, the movie has no context except for its plea of hipness to the mall crowd. Stripped of any attempts at meaning, Biel's encounter with Leatherface in the slaughterhouse is just exploitation — a sweaty chick in a white T-shirt running from a guy with a chainsaw between sides of beef.

New Yorker critic Bruce Diones called Bay's Bad Boys 2 "action porn," and it seems like Bay is using his producing career to expand the definition. Here, there's no artistic intent, no impression of the original's place in cinema as a context for today's horror films, no connection drawn between the social turmoil of then and today, nothing. Bay and Nispel's film aims square at teenage detachment and exploits it for superficial screams and groans. Some may speak of Massacre's "style," but if the film doesn't hold up to close reading even on a minimal level, then the buckets of eyeballs, salad bowls of blood, salted bloody limb stumps, projectile vomiting and quivering severed limbs are simply depraved images and nothing more. At least Jerry Bruckheimer, the megaproducer who launched Bay's directing career, manages to occasionally work in some crazy politics while he's exploiting the audience. Bay just wants to exploit viewers and get them out of the theater as soon as possible — like a bullet through the brain of moviegoers.

ReViEw...

The story goes that Michael Bay, weary of the bombs and bombast of "Pearl Harbor," wanted to sink his teeth into a small and hard-hitting film. Or, rather, a small and hard-hitting film about people who sink their teeth into other people.

"I don't want any movie bullshit," Bay told his young producer partners. He wanted to make a film that "got in the face of the viewer" -- one that "absolutely horrified."

And so we have v. 2 of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," a remake initially considered blasphemy by the horror hard-core -- until they got a load of the mind-bending work of first-time director Marcus Nispel and his co-conspirators, some of them survivors of the original massacre.

New Line Home Entertainment celebrates the improbable artistic success of "Chainsaw" Jr. with a surgically sharp two-disc "Platinum Edition" DVD set (retail $39.95). Extras dig deep, providing more background than any sane fan could want. Video (artfully letterboxed 1.85:1) and audio (ES and EX encoded) approach reference quality. Then there's that cameo by Ed Gein ... .

New Line takes its gore seriously, of course -- its "Final Destination 2" was one of last year's best DVDs -- but "Chainsaw" was something special. "This was one of our birthrights," company founder Robert Shaye says as he tells the tale of how he got a piece of the action on Tobe Hooper's 1974 original.

All involved with the remake seem awed by Hooper's legendary indie pic about rural cannibals who prey on a van full of hippies. Texas drive-in critic Joe Bob Briggs tries to explain its sickening but undeniable pull: "You're watching and thinking, 'Oh my god, I might be in the hands of a madman.' "

Remake director Nispel, a star of commercial and music-video production, notes that for all its infamy, Hooper's film was "not a splatter film at all -- it was very psychological." Before reality set in, Nispel wanted to make a "snuff film." He settled for a terrifying period piece -- of the early 1970s -- using production techniques of the era. "I don't want any speed ramps," Nispel says in his rolling German accent. "No 'Matrix' fights."

Nispel's longtime cinematographer, Daniel Pearl, worked on the original massacre and returned for the remake. (John Larroquette also reprised his bit, as the voice-of-doom narrator.) Pearl says he employed a bleach-bypass process that gave the new movie a "photochemical spin," part nightmare, part grainy docu -- all icky Gothic.

The cast of young actors, headed by Jessica Biel and Eric Balfour, did their work in the heat-and-humidity homelands outside Austin, Texas. Even the actor who plays the murderous icon Leatherface admits that he found the isolated locations too weird for comfort.

The DVD set's three feature-length commentaries give the filmmakers and cast plenty of time to delve into issues such as rewriting a pop classic and acting while hanging on a meat hook. The talks come in chapters: production, technical and story. Speakers are introduced radio docu-style, with comments edited for context and coherence. Nispel, writer Scott Kosar and producer Brad Fuller do most of the talking.

Casual viewers will get what they want from the slick but satisfying 75-minute docu "Chainsaw Redux: Making a Massacre," which begins with a brief history of the original. Don't miss the interviews with fans at the 30th anniversary screening of the original, predicting that the remake will suck. Then the night-vision footage of terrified viewers trying to ride out the new film.

A 15-minute docu rounds up deleted scenes, including a beginning and end set in an asylum, screen tests (or scream test, in the case of Erica Leerhsen) and two grisly scenes cut for the MPAA.

Connoisseurs of carnage will lap up "Ed Gein: The Ghoul of Planfield," a 20-minute docu about the Wisconsin mama's boy notorious for making skin suits out of victims. Ghastly crime-scene photos and goofy re-enactments help sell the story. "Psycho" screenwriter Joseph Stefano is on hand to proclaim Gein's crimes "the stuff of classic mythology and fairy tales."

***

The dairy state's dark side also gets a reveal in "Wisconsin Death Trip," the adaptation of Michael Lesy's book about the wave of misery, madness and all-purpose weirdness that beset the immigrant town of Black River Falls in the 1890s.

British director James Marsh doesn't make any excuses for the film's "violent and disturbing and horrible" stories. "I have an interest in that," Marsh says. "I think other people do, too." The tales are illustrated in part by the work of a gifted photographer who lived there and then. Images include keepsake funeral shots of children. The matter-of-fact narration comes straight from old newspaper accounts.

Director of photography Eigil Bryld says he blended the old photos with History Channel-style re-enactments to create "a confusion." Viewers have to "always expect that a photo might come alive," Bryld says in the commentary he shares with Marsh. The process used for the project's Super 16mm film was similar to that used for stills in the late 1800s, Bryld says.

Home Vision Entertainment has released the film-fest favorite from 1999 on one disc (retail $29.98). Images (1.78:1) are handsome, mostly silvery black-and-whites. The eclectic roots music comes across with sufficient impact.

"Midwestern Gothic: The Making of Wisconsin Death Trip" is a nicely made low-budget effort that runs 23 minutes. It gives a feel for just how close this project was to a student film. The crew all appeared in the film, Marsh says: "Everyone had to put a frock on and have something horrible happen to them."

***

George Romero's zombie flicks have suffered at the hands of video companies, especially "Night of the Living Dead," which, sadly, dwells in the public domain. Anchor Bay Entertainment, usually one of the good guys, was the perpetrator of a ghastly "director's cut" DVD of "Dawn of the Dead" back in 1997.

The company gets it right this time with a new "Dawn," this time the U.S. theatrical cut (retail $19.98). Colors that were, well, dead, on the old DVD look terrific, with Crayola reds and purples pumping up the cartoonish vibe. Contrasts are quite good, considering the 1979 vintage, and flesh tones look yummy. Audio is OK.

Commentary comes from the avuncular Romero, his co-director wife and effects man Tom Savini, who effectively got his start on the film as a "wild kid making things up."

They talk about working with drunken zombies and the "cover your ass"-style of shooting (lots of coverage; fix it in editing). Some of the zombie mall rats went on to achieve great things, they say, citing a Pulitzer Prize winner. "When you're born in (Romero's hometown of) Pittsburgh, one of the things you want to be is a zombie," Savini explains.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) - Tobe Hooper

People often misremember Rex Reed's review of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, casually misquoting him as calling the film the scariest movie he had ever seen; in fact, he called it "the most horryifying picture I have ever seen," and it's the difference that defines the split in the film's audiences, whether they be casual moviegoers or film buffs. (To be fair, Reed also called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre "more frightening than Night of the Living Dead.")

Dated though it may be, and low-budget as it is, Tobe Hooper's seminal horror film can be scary, even deceptively so, as the director works divergent styles. Deliberately overooked forays into sick humor give way to unsettling suspense and, once the shoe drops, a skin-crawlingly claustrophobic mania. On the other hand, some "horrified" culture watchers identify The Texas Chain Saw Massacre—bookended as it is by Wes Craven's 1972 The Last House on the Left and 1977 The Hills Have Eyes—as instrumental in the bottomless degradation of mainstream horror cinema.

At every opportunity, Hooper emphatically and misleadingly claims that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a nearly bloodless film, and mocks the MPAA's wisdom in not granting his film a PG (the MPAA cited pervasive intensity). It's true that Hooper's film suggests more horror than it actually depicts, but the ol' chainsaw does spectacularly meet flesh twice on camera. The raw immediacy of the film's budget-dictated 16mm film stock and documentary-styled proximity of camera and subject elevate tongue-in-cheek schlock to moments of genuine terror. Nevertheless, the film's most famous shot remains DP Daniel Pearl's invention of a tracking shot beneath a yard swing and up to the looming principal setting, a historic, late-1800s house.

The horror within is a brain-damaged family with a disrupted legacy in the now-automated local slaughterhouse. Burned by society, they've beat a retreat into squalor and cannibalistic madness, emerging only when hapless trespassers serve themselves up as fresh meat. The larger-than-life performances of Gunnar Hansen (as the now-iconic simpleton Leatherface), Edwin Neal (the addled "Hitch-Hiker"), teenage John Dugan (heavily made-up as "Grandpa"), and the inimitable Jim Siedow ("Old Man") have fired the imaginations of generations of horror fans to fill in the horrible blanks.

Perhaps especially in the post-Psycho era, the often dimwitted, insufferable, or shrill victims tend to inspire less audience affection than the "you'll love to hate them" villains. Paul A. Partain turns in a one-of-a-kind performance as maddening, wheelchair-bound Franklin (an arch, implied reminder of Vietnam's unwelcome returnees), but it's Marilyn Burns who earns a top rank among scream queens for infusing the grueling role of Sally Hardesty with such utterly convincing terror.

Given its whiplash stylings, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre probably shouldn't work as well as it does, but the experimental soundtrack of industrial stingers and recklessly over-the-top humor balances with subtle satirical flourishes and the stripping away of much of horror's conscious artifice. In his laughing-outlaw way, Hooper pointed a new direction for horror cinema, but his implosive career and the over-stylized Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake testify that his mad genius was a swift lightning not easily trapped in bottles.

..CoMpArInG BoTh TeXtS..cRiTiCaL

The new version of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" is a contemptible film: Vile, ugly and brutal. There is not a shred of a reason to see it. Those who defend it will have to dance through mental hoops of their own devising, defining its meanness and despair as "style" or "vision" or "a commentary on our world." It is not a commentary on anything, except the marriage of slick technology with the materials of a geek show.

The movie is a remake of, or was inspired by, the 1974 horror film by Tobe Hooper. That film at least had the raw power of its originality. It proceeded from Hooper's fascination with the story and his need to tell it. This new version, made by a man who has previously directed music videos, proceeds from nothing more than a desire to feed on the corpse of a once-living film. There is no worthy or defensible purpose in sight here: The filmmakers want to cause disgust and hopelessness in the audience. Ugly emotions are easier to evoke and often more commercial than those that contribute to the ongoing lives of the beholders.

The movie begins with grainy "newsreel" footage of a 1974 massacre (the same one as in the original film; there are some changes but this is not a sequel). Then we plunge directly into the formula of a Dead Teenager Movie, which begins with living teenagers and kills them one by one. The formula can produce movies that are good, bad, funny, depressing, whatever. This movie, strewn with blood, bones, rats, fetishes and severed limbs, photographed in murky darkness, scored with screams, wants to be a test: Can you sit through it? There were times when I intensely wanted to walk out of the theater and into the fresh air and look at the sky and buy an apple and sigh for our civilization, but I stuck it out. The ending, which is cynical and truncated, confirmed my suspicion that the movie was made by and for those with no attention span.

The movie doesn't tell a story in any useful sense, but is simply a series of gruesome events which finally are over. It probably helps to have seen the original film in order to understand what's going on, since there's so little exposition. Only from the earlier film do we have a vague idea of who the people are in this godforsaken house, and what their relationship is to one another. The movie is eager to start the gore and unwilling to pause for exposition.

I like good horror movies. They can exorcise our demons. "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" doesn't want to exorcise anything. It wants to tramp crap through our imaginations and wipe its feet on our dreams. I think of filmgoers on a date, seeing this movie and then -- what? I guess they'll have to laugh at it, irony being a fashionable response to the experience of being had.

Certainly they will not be frightened by it. It recycles the same old tired thriller tools that have been worn out in countless better movies. There is the scary noise that is only a cat. The device of loud sudden noises to underline the movements of half-seen shadows. The van that won't start. The truck that won't start. The car that won't start. The character who turns around and sees the slasher standing right behind her. One critic writes, "Best of all, there was not a single case of 'She's only doing that (falling, going into a scary space, not picking up the gun) because she's in a thriller.' " Huh? Nobody does anything in this movie for any other reason. There is no reality here. It's all a thriller.

There is a controversy involving Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill: Volume 1," which some people feel is "too violent." I gave it four stars, found it kind of brilliant, felt it was an exhilarating exercise in nonstop action direction. The material was redeemed, justified, illustrated and explained by the style. It was a meditation on the martial arts genre, done with intelligence and wit. "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" is a meditation on the geek-show movie. Tarantino's film is made with grace and joy. This movie is made with venom and cynicism. I doubt that anybody involved in it will be surprised or disappointed if audience members vomit or flee.