Well, I finally saw the Texas Chainsaw "reimagining," and boy, did I ever get my hopes up for this one. I'll be honest -- I probably bought into the hype a little too well, and compacted with the number of great reviews I'd read, the flick had little chance of living up to what I was expecting. Still...good God. Many would say that comparing it to the original causes a rift in objectivity, but seriously, it's like they chopped off all of the really twisted stuff, replacing it with more of the same old crap and hoping the added gore would keep you from noticing. The changes seem designed more to make the movie conventional enough to be a money-generator than any sort of creative new ideas or "well, what if we did this instead?" hope shots. For what it is, I guess it's okay, but "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" breaks no new ground and doesn't even hold up against those other lousy sequels on a "depraved joyride" level. It's just made better, performed better. The story itself? Definitely not better.
The only thing I'd give 'em credit for is for playing the horror hand straight. The atmosphere is correct, but that's about it. The characters do enormously stupid and unrealistic things to remain in the line of fire, and basically, what you get is something that's just a few notches above any of the "Friday the 13th" movies...albeit with a better cast. This movie was just way too artificial to succeed in what it set out to accomplish.
That said, is it worth seeing? Yeah, I guess so. I have to wonder if I'd be this critical had I not gone in with such high expectations -- I'm sure it's a factor, but really, our group of six left the theater seeming more apathetic to the past two hours than anything else, and we've got wildly varying tastes. All in all, you're not doing yourself any huge injustice by missing this one, but compared to most of the other horror flicks to come out in this past year, it works well enough. It just doesn't go beyond working "well enough," and that's the big issue for me. Oh well.
Posted by Matt on 10/30/2003. E-mail me!










Chestnuts roasted by 







hehe tim bits that word is so fuckin funny.