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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(remake)
*
Cinema
Review - December 13, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 18. USA.
98 minutes. Directed by Marcus Nispel. Produced by Michael Bay, Mike Fleiss.
Written by Scott Kosar; based on the 1974 film written by Tobe Hooper, Kim
Henkel. Starring Jessica Biel, Jonathan Tucker, Erica Leerhsen, Mike Vogel,
Eric Balfour, Andrew Bryniarski, R. Lee Ermey, David
Dorfman.
There's a shot in this movie where a girl has
just blown her brains out, and the camera pulls back through a hole to reveal
the bloody head. It turns out that the hole was in a car window, but while
the shot was going on, it looked like it was travelling through the bullet
wound, in some kind of reference to the effects in "Three
Kings".
I don't know if the effect was on purpose, and
we're supposed to gasp at ourselves when we realise it's just the window.
I do know that the shot serves no dramatic purpose. It's just a slick and
flashy image, one more thing to throw at the audience, the kind of empty
trick that the worst of film school hacks go nuts for. It fits the movie,
for sure.
"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", the
new remake of the 1974 classic, is an awful and depressing experience which
seems less interested in scaring us than in springing every jack from the
box. When it's not lifting straight from the original, it's adding more sadism
and violence, or cranking up the sound and slickening up the look. There's
a simple philosophy behind a movie like this: Add more squishing, add more
screaming, and it'll be better. Or at least it'll make more
money.
You can sort of see the temptation. You can understand
why they thought it would work. The original film starts slow. The opening
sequence in the van, not all that well acted, goes on perhaps too long. And
the violence, creepy as it is, might be too familiar for an audience that
has grown up knowing what Leatherface looks like and how the shot of the
girl on the meat hook plays out. Why not add a whole bunch more people getting
put on meat hooks, and make sure we can hear the crunching of flesh and bone?
Why not bring in Leatherface sooner, make his costume chunkier, show him
in fast and heart-stopping cuts? Why not change the hitchhiker character
from a creepy element of foreboding to something more to do with the carnage,
and tie it in with a bookend in the finale, to suggest a cycle of lurking
danger?
The filmmakers are trying to cut out all the dead
spots and make a work of non-stop intensity, but nothing onscreen feels like
it's actually happening. Everything is so fake and calculated that we can
imagine the puppetmasters sitting and cackling, amazed at how well they've
stripped the fat. The opening newsreel footage seems to have been shot on
the same stock as everything else; it's in black and white, and it has a
few scratchy lines, but it's the kind of uniform grain that could have been
done with one mouse-click on Final Cut Pro. The scenes in the van have been
made duller -- instead of some kids on the way to a summer home having visited
a relative's grave, they're on the way to a Lynrd Skynrd concert, are smuggling
a few ounces of pot back from Mexico and look like a group of models. The
new Leatherface costume looks ridiculous. The ending is too smug to be powerful.
And there are scenes with a sheriff who alludes to necrophilia, has a liking
for physical and mental torture and screams alarmingly crudely -- it's not
half as chilling as the understated old man in the original, and it is a
performance whereby we squirm for the career of R. Lee Ermey instead of
marvelling at how effective he is.
"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" was produced by
Michael Bay, and I was surprised by how much of his influence can be seen
in the visual style. The gloss holds us at a distance instead of being
impressive, the camera washes over the characters instead of trying to study
or identify with them. The director is a first-timer called Marcus Nispel,
who has become famous in the fields of music videos and commercials. A lot
of commercials. His website lists four hundred of them, including projects
for Marlboro, Nike and K-Mart. Further evidence, I shouldn't wonder, that
working for the wrong side can build a man's skill while wearing down his
conscience.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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