After scoring a large quantity of pot from New Mexico, five friends on their way to a Lynard Skynard concert in Dallas pick up a traumatized hitchhiker, who subsequently kills herself in their van. After calling the sheriff, a sociopathic imposter, the five quickly find themselves fighting for their lives against a family of cannibals.
This unnecessary remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre does an adequate job of rehashing the original albeit with more gore and less subtlety. Sure it’s mainly about Leatherface, but we also get his wonderful crazy brethren including Sheriff Hoyt,
and Old Monty
There’s nothing wrong with this film, per se, it just didn’t do anything for me. We get the requisite Leatherface chainsaw chase, which is pretty effective in its ability to induce terror, yet the rest just feels very paint-by-numbers. There really was no reason to remake the superior original. Whirlygirl remarked that the original was more effective because you believe that Leatherface could exist. In this remake Leatherface is more of an unstoppable creature a la Jason. Also, they make the cardinal mistake of showing him without his mask on. These characters are always more frightening when left to the imagination. Remember how disappointed you were when you see Jason in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter?
1 comment:
This is sitting on top of my TV but I want to watch parts 3 and 4 first. I can't tell how I feel about remakes that are good movies but leave one asking why they bothered.
The Dawn remake was great because it added a new spin to the story in a number of ways, things like The Omen remake are horrible and sully the original, American remakes of Japanese horror are clumsy and miss the point but at least the J-horror is getting noticed -- but what about this one? Not good, not bad, not Japanese...I'll be exploring this question after the break.
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