The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning
... or, How pointless can one movie be? This one basically begins with the assumption that there are just so many unanswered questions in the original story that people are dying to have answered – the idea that evil of such nature as this has some kind of reasonable plan, some complicated mesh of forethought that needs another 90 minutes of disection to comprehend. It’s like making a movie trying to explain exactly why Frank N Furter, Riff Raff, Magenta and Columbia found their way to where Brad and Janet found them in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. To call it unnecessary just doesn’t even begin to cover the misguidedness. Even if we consider the source material of Ed Gein etc … is there ever really anything in the childhood or backstory of killers like this that explains why they did what they did? So we get a handful of scenes here asking questions like, Why is grandpa crippled? Because they’re crazy and they cut his legs off. Why is Hoyt the Sheriff? Because they’re crazy and they killed the sheriff. And so on.
There’s something to be said for the fact that the film makers seem to have realised the pointlessness of the backstory too, and outside of these admittedly few stabs at exposition, this simply turns into Another Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or The First Texas Chainsaw Massacre rather than The Beginning … sure, its slickness probably makes it a little better than at least one of the old sequels to the original original, and R. Lee Ermy is as freakishly watchable as he was in the first; but really, this is still about as pointless as it gets, and there are many more gorefests I’d sooner watch for a tenth time than watch this for the first time again.