Dir. Marcus Nispel, 2003, USA, 98 mins
Cast:
Jessica Biel, Eric Balfour, Andrew Bryniarski, R.Lee Ermey, Lauren German
Apparently 90 percent of the audience going to see this year's Texas Chainsaw Massacre offering don't remember Tobe Hooper's original, which lets first feature director Marcus Nispel and producer Michael Bay off the hook. Hardly a remake, this new version simply retains some of the same characters and plot sequences, and is still set in the early 70s, but boils down to a predictably sticky screamer. Even the Leatherface family name has been changed from the original Sawyer to Hewitt. What's wrong with Sawyer - saw-er, as in one who saws? It's the kind of tongue in cheek humour that made the genre.
The fundamental difference between then and now seems to be that film makers like Nispel and Bay are making movies for different reasons. By their own admission, Texas Chanisaw Massacre 2003 was made to launch Nispel and Bay's new Platinum Dunes company or "label" as they refer to it. These guys haven't been sweating it out on the sets low budget porn films waiting for their big break, they are multi-award winning commercial and video directors. Their actors aren't the friends they made on the beds of the one camera triple X features they cut their teeth on, but are well known faces from television dramas and advertisements.
To 'remake' The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as a savvy commercial business enterprise takes away the raw, shaky, cult creating mythology of the original. Hooper's 1974 version cost $150,000 to make and has grossed more than $100 million worldwide, an amazing feat but not a good enough reason to do another version. Gone are the repulsively creepy grandparents and their cannibal family dinner around the kitchen table. The fact that they have been reduced to cannibalism by the death of their slaughterhouse business is skipped by the new guys. Instead we have a strange band of inbreds sheltering the crazy Leatherface, whose reason for killing young hitchhikers remains unclear, apart from the easy one that he's simply a psychopath.
Indeed all the regular horror flick signatures are heavily signposted for us. The film opens with the young hippies, smoking dope and indulging in casual sex - the usual road to ruin for this surprisingly moralistic and right wing genre. There are warnings of the dangers of sexually transmitted disease (AIDS would not be too far around the corner) and our sole survivor is the one who rejects the dope and just wants to get married. There are cars that won't start, practical jokes, wait here until I get backs, the randomness of their situation (it could easily have been you if you'd felt sorry for that hitchhiker), the isolated house, idiot country folk with bad teeth and cocky well groomed townies, Christ-like symbolism ("please forgive me" says Erin to the foot of a body impaled on a hook; a reminder of Jennifer's "forgive me" as she kneels at the altar in I Spit on Your Grave), the strong female and the (now almost pleading) assertion that the story was inspired by true events. The kids are on their way to a Lynard Skynard concert, in Wes Craven's Last House on the Left it was Blood Lust. The fact that these elements show the guys know their horror films just results in another clichéd mix of every horror film that's ever been made, the chainsaw reduced to a slaughter weapon of choice rather than an integral aspect of the film.
Despite the pointless remake of a film of its time, the 2003 version has high production value. Shot on location in Austin, Texas where Nispel says "nothing gets thrown away", the film has a true sense of helplessness, waste and heat. With temperatures reaching 105 degrees during filming you can almost smell the sweat coming off our hapless hippies and the rotting meat that surrounds them for most of the opening scenes. There is a very real sense that despite the vast empty landscape around them they are somehow trapped in this small forgotten town and the phrase "we're all gonna die" is not just said for dramatic effect but is probably true. Billowing sheets on the washing line flap back and forth menacingly in true Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D style.
The Hewitt house is also a gem, a genuine 1854 farmhouse moved to the country from the University of Texas campus and standing vacant since the 1960s. Scenes of it backlit against a blackened sky with mist rising from its roof are truly demonic, as is the silhouetted figure of Leatherface working on his victims. This is largely down to the excellent minimalist lighting of the film, which focuses usually on one source of light, from a window or between floorboards heightening the film's predatory and claustrophobic atmosphere.
The feeling that this house is dirty and dangerous is suggested even before we see Leatherface's trophies. R Lee Ermey's Sheriff Hoyt is wonderfully filthy and crude, and some of his scenes preying on the young victims are truly nasty, as is the decision to show wheelchair bound Old Monty (Terrence Evans) emptying his colostomy bag into a putrid toilet. A let-up is the somewhat endearing image of Leatherface industriously sewing together his human masks on an old manual Singer sewing machine, and is one of the film's more comic moments.
Tobe Hooper's original has appeared in the US Museum of Modern Art. It is unlikely this one will follow and that chasm between the two is where all the fault with this new version lies. To see the film now is not the point, it is to have watched it in the early 80s on a pirate video, witnessed its evolution into a video nasty and wonder where exactly beneath the bowels of the earth it had erupted from. A remake could never hope to capture that iconoclastic subversion.
Rebecca Kemp
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