Old Vs New Week: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Well kiddies I am back for Day 2 of Old Vs New and we shall see the variant between of the original and its 2003 remake.   The stories are a bit different with each director having their own vision.  So get your clogs on, make a lot of noise, and shucks go hide in the basement with the killer.  This is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

In abject fear, Biel's hair is still looking good.

Spoilers need killin’!!!

The original Chainsaw film was loosely based on the exploits of real life serial killer Ed Gein formerly of Wisconsin.  So we change locations and build a bizarre family of cannibalistic, graverobbing nutter butters tormenting teens and making spare ribs.  Doesn’t that sound keen?  Director Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Eaten Alive, Salem’s Lot, Poltergeist, Lifeforce. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Body Bags and Night Terrors) claims in articles and interviews the thought behind his horror Mecca was being swarmed by mass loads of shoppers in a department store during the holidays and the first thing he spied was a chainsaw and how ideal that tool would have been to cut a bloody swath to the exit.  I think we all have had days like that. 

Welcome to Applebee's. Texas style.

Five teenagers go on a road trip because their friend and her brother want to pay respect to their grandfather’s grave.   This time it was desecrated with a human skeleton perched on top of the headstone posed like some sick joke. Our plucky teenagers pick up an odd fellow on the road who informs them all about a killing floor and head cheese.  He freaks the kids out when he cuts on himself and they chuck him out their van.   The kids head to an old house looking for some assistance only to be ambushed and systematically rubbed out of existence by our villain Leatherface and his demented family.   One survivor makes her way from the loony tunes and we assume went into hiding.  Enter a decade of abject silence other than did you see that warped film on the drive-in or Beta-Max.    The sheer desperation of our lead actress is felt from the disgusting view of this house covered in bones and dead animal carcasses strewn throughout the home of these raving nutters and it gives such a bleak vision. This film is brutal, vicious and an awe inspiring example of an independent film.

Director Marcus Nispel (Frankenstein, Pathfinder, Friday the 13^th and Conan the Barbarian) created a different vision of 5 carefree teenagers that pick up a terrified girl hitchhiker who warns them all that they will all die out here and blows her brains out in the back of the mini-van, grossing her would be saviors and thus putting a cramp in the day.   Looking for local help our teens happen across the house of horrors with shockingly enough a demented family of cannibals and lunatics.  This film has graphic dismembering and gouging death scenes unlike the original which most of the violence was implied.  ArteriaI sprays, bodies being worked on by Leatherface.  The meat hook scene will cause the weak of stomach or heart to have more than a few issues and quite possibly another look at lunch.  This version is bloodier, disgusting and a bit on the odd and while there is some dark humor make no mistake that they wanted to top the original.

 I gather Nispel felt the visual was more necessary than dialogue driven in describing how wacko the Hoyt family is.  Writer Scott Kosar seems to be a remake writer with 3 remakes under his belt including: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Crazies and The Amityville Horror.   So clearly he can write…something someone else already created groundwork for him to write ahead of time.  An amusing fact of both films that the narration is done by John Larroquette and I hope he got more than a joint for the remake.

Ah the annual chainsaw dance of joy.

For me they were some solid scares, decent enough performances but honestly they plugged it entirely too much via media of TV, Internet and papers.  Also I am not overtly thrilled with Michael Bay producing so much as a high school play let alone a film.  As a film, the remake starts off with a fast pace, peters out, starts up again, gets extremely gory and then start waning down and frankly that is an odd beat for the watcher to dance to.  The original starts off slow and depicts disturbing issues off the bat but it moves at a leisurely pace which was not uncommon for films of that age but to be perfectly honest it still scares the figurative crap out of me.