Chainsaw film franchise turning rusty
3D effects not enough to save latest instalment
This whole Texas chainsaw thing has started to go downhill, and you remember how good it used to be. The new film, Texas Chainsaw 3D, is a sequel to the classic 1974 horror movie — very influential in its use of meat hooks and the iconography of the slaughterhouse — whose main attributes is that it extends the story into a new generation (oh yay!) and that when people wave chainsaws at you, they appear to come right off the screen and into your popcorn.
In return, we must suffer the many tropes of the genre — a group of attractive and oversexed young people heading for a deserted home in the woods for a par-tay, followed by a slau-ghter — and graphic scenes of people being sliced in two.
Special effects have really boomed in the intervening years, and while Texas Chainsaw 3D still falls back on the old standards (a guy impaled on a meat hook, a woman locked in a freezer), its now possible to show folks being sawed through the middle with alarming authenticity. Thus does cinematic technology march on.
The film starts with a recap of the first film, with the drooling, murderous and possible inbred family the Sawyers being burned alive by their neighbours. This is on account of Jed Sawyer (Dan Yeager), a hulk who lives in the basement and furnishes the house with the bones of people Texas Chainsaw 3D
½ stars out of 5 Starring: Alexandra Daddario, Dan Yeager, Trey Songz Directed by: John Luessenhop Written by: Adam Marcus, Debra Sullivan and Kirsten Elms
Hhe hacks to death.
Jed also cuts off their faces to form a skin mask for himself: the character, dubbed Leatherface, is based on the same serial killer, Ed Gein, who also inspired Psycho and Silence of the Lambs.
In this telling, all the Sawyers don’t die in the fire. Leatherface survives, of course, and so does a Sawyer infant, who is taken away and raised by another couple. She grows up to be Heather, played by Alexandra Daddario as a walking midriff with a pout on top. If my math is correct, Heather is 38, and she might be, too. Just not 38 years old.
Heather learns of her heritage when her grandmother dies and she inherits the old Sawyer mansion in Texas. Her adoptive parents confirm the news (“You are from a shit heap. There, now you know”) and she heads off on a road trip with three friends and a hunky hitchhiker. Among them is Ryan, her boyfriend, who is played by rapper Trey Songz in his screen debut and who distinguishes himself by being no worse than any of the other actors.
Mayhem eventually ensues, and those who grew up on Tobe Hooper’s innovative original — he created a Southern Gothic of nightmarish creepiness — will recognize the familiar scenes: big old Leatherface silhouetted against the sky as he chases this victim or that through the woods, the grisly sound of the chainsaw starting up, the ill-advised slow walk into dark basements to see what’s doing.
“Getting a bad feeling here,” says one policeman as he enters the place where people have had their fingers snipped off with clippers and bloodstains streak the floor. No kidding, Sherlock.
Director John Luessenhop (Takers) knows the beats of horror, but the story keeps pulling him away from it to a wider tale of the townsfolk who killed all those Sawyers so many years ago. They seem to be even worse, with the possible exception of Carl, a cute policeman played by Scott Eastwood, Clint’s boy, who takes over the role of love interest after the other candidates have been skewered.
He’s not very good at it, though, and Texas Chainsaw 3D isn’t very good at it either: a blood-soaked copycat that vacillates between unwatchable violence and unendurable cliché, and with the promise of more to come. Getting a bad feeling here.