A lot of modern horror has become more synonymous with
horrifying rather than terrifying — the chief difference being the latter is
something that grips you on a base, visceral level certainly, but also provokes
significant feelings of psychological unease. The gulf between these two approaches
is roundly apparent in The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre: The Beginning, a stalking franchise prequel of near-bottomless
sadism and equal pointlessness.

Grotesquerie and graphic bloodletting figured prominently
into Marcus Nispel’s 2003 remake of director Tobe Hooper’s gritty,
groundbreaking 1974 horror picture, but never overwhelmed the predominant
emotion — a choking hopelessness — that made the movie so wrenchingly effective,
and feel like one big, long, coarse exhalation. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, on the other hand, is
full of only desultory jump scares and abattoir torture. It doesn’t generate
genuine tension; it’s gore pornography, plain and simple.

Genre loyalists should still turn out in droves opening
weekend for what’s perceived as a faithful article, but with the releases of The Grudge 2 and Saw III on the horizon, it’s very doubtful that The Beginning will be able to approach
the grosses of its 2003 predecessor, which pulled in $80 million domestically
and another $26 million internationally. That film, after all, had the swelling
intrigue of a franchise reboot, as well as both an advertising campaign and
some modicum of word-of-mouth that pointed up the picture’s
based-on-true-events roots, which helped extend its audience.

The Beginning’s
margins should be smaller and more staunchly of a piece with the traditional
core horror base, meaning theatrical returns more inline with Boogeyman, The Hills Have Eyes, Hostel
or The Amityville Horror, which
collectively averaged around $50 million Stateside.

Directed by Jonathan Liebesman (Darkness Falls) and set in 1969, the movie centers on two brothers,
Eric and Dean (Matt Bomer and Taylor Handley), headed across the state of Texas
to report for duty in Vietnam. In tow are their respective girlfriends,
Chrissie and Bailey (Jordana Brewster and Diora Baird). An auto accident during
a would-be robbery leaves the quartet badly injured, but when an apparent
lawman, Sheriff Hoyt (R. Lee Ermey), arrives on the scene things only get
worse.

Sheriff Hoyt isn’t a sheriff at all, but the patriarch of
the twisted, cannibalistic Hewitt clan, which includes his disfigured, mentally
challenged nephew Thomas, aka Leatherface (Andrew Bryniarski). Hoyt takes Eric,
Dean and Bailey with him back to his house, where an unremittingly grim regimen
of torment commences. Thrown from the vehicle, Chrissie eventually makes her
way to the house with a local biker (Lee Tergesen), and tries to save her
friends.

The screenplay from Sheldon Turner (2005’s The Longest Yard remake) tosses out a
few trivial, unifying tidbits (Leatherface was deposited in a dumpster after
his mother’s death upon his birth, and we see him craft his first titular
mask), but these morsels feel less like grand and/or illuminating character revelations
and more like arbitrary filler between torture and killings. Exactly who, after
all, has been clamoring for answers to these questions, particularly when the
explanations are so cursory?

Such digressions feel wan for two reasons. First, because Leatherface
is not a prototypal horror villain protagonist in the same sense as Friday the 13th’s Jason or A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy, and
secondly, because the movie treats Leatherface as a morbid, lethal caged circus
curiosity. Hoyt is very much the central figure in the movie, calling
Leatherface out only when he needs to have him pound on and/or cut up someone.

The film is furthermore damned by its own lack of interior
logic and cleanly defined spatial relationships, most notably in the third act.
At one point Dean turns the tables on Hoyt, but — seemingly only since the
ending is predetermined by the survival of characters we’ve seen in the 2003
movie — implausibly doesn’t finish Hoyt off. Dean also then magically appears
during an off-site confrontation between Chrissie and Leatherface, who’s previously
shown no sort of skulking wherewithal to dispense with one victim in the manner
that he does.

Cinematographer Lukas Ettlin (the American remake of The Grudge) can’t match the anguished
antebellum junkyard palettes of Daniel Pearl, who shot the 1974 original and
its recent solid re-imagining. Composer Steve Jablonsky’s score, meanwhile, further hammers
home the obvious in offending, exaggerated fashion. (New Line, R, 89 minutes)