Texas Chainsaw 3D review

                 The original 1974 “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is generally a film that a lot of (younger) people have never seen, but will claim it to be the goriest, bloodiest movie of all time. In reality, it’s actually a much more subtle and slower burn than the title might suggest.  When Tobe Hooper released his debut film, it was a surprise breakout hit for a non-Hollywood, low-budget exploitation film. It was made with a lot of skill and craft, and it presented a bleak vision of America’s rotting lower-class, where a rural family traps and kills passers-by for food, furniture, and entertainment. It was unsettlingly realistic and brutal in its depiction of complete depravity, but it really wasn’t all that gory. Most of the gore is either imagined by its viewers or perpetuated in cinematic urban-legend by those who have never dared to watch it.

                In the wake of the original masterpiece (yes, I use THAT word) there have been several remakes and sequels that have never matched its quality or its sheer delirious terror. However, it comes to my surprise that no one has ever managed to make a 3D version for this franchise until now. Unsurprisingly, in gaining three dimensional chainsaws and viscera, we are left with one dimensional story-telling and an absurdly sloppy screenplay.

                 “Texas Chainsaw 3D” begins mere seconds after the final moments of the 1974 original, where we find out that the cannibal family had been hiding other relatives, including a mother with a new-born. After the last survivor rats out the killers to the police, they are ruthlessly executed, as their farm house is burned to the ground.
                   The baby, however, is rescued and sent to live with a loving suburban family where she grows up with no prior knowledge of her psychotic history. But that all changes when she receives the deed to a mansion (that was never even mentioned in the original movie…but okay) that she legally obtains after her great-whatever dies. She then decides to take her dumb college friends to check out the new house. Mysteries are then revealed and murder lurks behind every door.  Though, the biggest mystery that is never solved is how our heroine manages to be college-aged when she was supposedly born in 1973 and she uses an iPhone as a flashlight--Just saying.

                Of course this is a bad movie and you should already know that going in. It’s completely ridiculous, gratuitous, and almost nothing in it makes any sense.  Where the original used intense moments of build-up and silence to construct the tension, this one ramps everything up for chain-rattling jump scares and 3D meat-slicing—both deli and human.  I won’t bother crediting any the actors because none of them are noteworthy or particularly talented. They are there, they are young, and some of them are quite busty. 

                One of the qualities that made the original quite scary and effective is its graceful simplicity. There were no motives, no subplots, and no catharsis by its end.  In this new version, the narrative is painfully convoluted and bulging with unneeded chunks of exposition, including a misguided side-story dealing with the vendetta between Leatherface and the local policemen—who strangely enough, have not aged at all in 39 years.

                Despite how truly bland and hackneyed this stupid thing was, it’s kind of fun in that tacky-80’s-slasher-film way.  If you’re the type of horror fanboy who gets a kick out the homosexual subtext in “Nightmare on Elm Street 2” or the bad one-liners in “Jason Takes Manhattan” then you might enjoy the cheesiness and un-ironic cliché’s that this movie’s full of.  But if you don’t feel like wasting thirteen dollars and ninety-two minutes for a mild chuckle, then by all means don’t bother with “Texas Chainsaw 3D”.

Grade: D 

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2013