Texas Chainsaw: Mini Review...

What's it about?
A direct sequel to Tobe Hooper's legendary 1974 film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in which, after Sally Hardesty's escape, the Sawyer family - including an extended rabble of misfits coming along for family support - are burned alive in their home. It's 1973 and there's only one survivor - a Sawyer family baby - who grows up forty years later to be in her early twenties. Seriously. Lack of respect for the audience's intelligence and the horror genre in general aside, young 'Heather' is surprised one day to learn that her grandmother - whom she never knew - has died and left her an inheritance in (where else) Newt, Texas - where all the chaos happened in 1973. She and her friends go to investigate - guess what happens next.
Who would I recognise in it?
Alexandra Daddario, Tania Raymonde, Gunnar Hansen, Bill Moseley, Marilyn Burns, Scott Eastwood, Richard Riehle.
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
Written by Adam Marcus (the writer/director of the initially intriguing but ultimately lamentable Jason Goes To Hell), the film starts off strong - the attention to detail in re-staging the post-massacre location from the original film is impressive - with a non-Leatherface cameo from original chainsaw-wielder Gunnar Hansen, and Bill 'Chop Top' Moseley playing Jim Siedow's part as Sawyer patriarch Drayton. However, the strange tone of the film - in which the monsters are unconvincingly cast as victims to be sympathised with - becomes evident early on. Moving forward to the present day - from 1973 to 2013 - comes the film's major F-You to the viewers. It's not explicitly stated that it is present day - but the up-to-date hip-hop, vehicles, and (most blatantly of all) smart phones - makes the space-time continuum-breaking 2013 setting undeniable. As previously stated, but repeated for emphasis - the infant survivor of the 1973 lynching grows up FORTY YEARS LATER to be in her early 20s, in the shape of Alexandra Daddario (True Detective, Burying The Ex)...

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You know what movie should be remade? Drive-In Massacre...

Remakes. They've been dime-a-dozen for years, and the success rate isn't exactly high. Generally they've brought in box office bucks, but money doesn't equal quality – nor genuine purpose. The problem with remakes remains thus: beloved icons of cinema history (some of them bonafide franchises unto themselves, many of them within the horror genre) are re-heated to simply trade on an established name. Cynical business sense in abundance, but artistically and from a fan's perspective, it's frequently devoid of true merit. Add to this the fact that we horror fans possess a particularly potent brand of curiosity, a curiosity that convinces us to spend money to see these remakes simply to see how they compare to the original films, even though the result is typically that the original remains to be the best. Remakes today almost never produce a greater film than the original.

A quick perusal of my DVD and Blu-Ray collection that's weighing down my walls, reveals numerous examples of films that have been remade, of films that are themselves remakes.

Some of these remakes are decent (or even pretty good), but simply don't touch on the power and status of the original films. Night of the Living Dead 1990, Halloween 2007, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2003 are all examples of this level of the remake strata.

Far below that we have turgid and even quite cynical rehashes, such as Dawn of the Dead 2004 (vapid, devoid of intelligence, all mouth and no trousers), Day of the Dead 2008 (no, just no), The Fog 2005 (again, no, just no), A Nightmare On Elm Street 2010 (a poorly paced and pale imitation of the film that gave life to New Line Cinema, cobbled together from badly executed sequences pinched from Craven's original), and The Thing 2011. The last one is technically a “prequel” (and a pointless one at that as we know exactly what will happen to the Norwegian camp), but it attempts to re-tread John Carpenter's 1982 footsteps so often (while completely ignoring the alien's modus operandi in the process) that it's clearly a remake that wants to hide inside an imitation.

Click "READ MORE" below for more remakes, and why Drive-In Massacre would be a worthwhile candidate for another going-over.

Mum & Dad...

Low budget Brit-horror, the British Texas Chainsaw Massacre as those behind the flick tout it, and you can see why. A ram-shackle band of a 'family' inflicting untold horrors upon their captives, while the filmmakers completely shred the rosy image the vast majority of the viewing public have when "family" springs to mind ... or indeed "Mum & Dad" ... which is quite possibly at the heart of why this flick fucks with your head.

Just saying the title immediately sparks your brain into thinking that you're on about your own parents, when in fact you're talking about the fictional "Mum & Dad" in this "micro budget" horror (the words of Microwave, one the groups behind it, not me - £100,000 to me is a shedload of cash).

Anyway - fucked up this movie most definitely is, and it's not always from what you see - it's often what you see suggests. At the peak of this mountain of creep-inducing familial slaying is 'what' is upstairs ... when you think beyond what you're simply seeing in those moments, and a bit deeper (as the result of a few words), you can't help but screw yourself up into a ball making a variety of disturbed and/or disgusted noises.

It's low budget, it has a story, it sits amidst a group of horror movie peers which have always sat high above the rest of the genre - and indeed the many of today's offerings. Hostel as a franchise was never that good (I maintain that the two movies could have been merged into one script, and that that on film would have been worthwhile) ... and SAW, as a franchise, farted out like a released baloon when #4 came along (#1 and #3 good, #2 meh, #4 shite, #5 I haven't even seen yet).

It doesn't hang around either at a slim 85 minutes, but it's a must-see for proper horror fans seeking something much more than another trap-obsessed torture film with either little to say, or such a preposterously convoluted plot you just can't be arsed.

And for those who saw High Tension (aka Switchblade Romance) and thought it was messed up when the dude shags that severed head ... well, take that general idea ... and just make it more disturbed. Yep, that's one of the multitude of reasons why "Mum & Dad" is highly recommended to all horror-heads.