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80What a superb job director Marcus Nispel has done re-creating, yet also revising, 1974's grisly, gristly, protein-centric masterpiece.
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75Has no pretensions about sneaking up on you -- it simply charges, motor humming and blades flying, carving the spot where masochism and entertainment meet.
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70Adding R. Lee Ermey to the Leatherface clan was a masterful move.
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63The film delivers with enough consistency to warrant a qualified recommendation for those seeking a few extra scares at this time of the year.
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63Manages to pull off an adequate amount of scares, when compared to most horror flicks in theaters this Halloween season.
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60This particular reconceptualization actually does an impressive job of capturing the nasty dread of the original. It certainly is a vast improvement over those previous remakes/sequels.
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60The look, created by Hooper’s cinematographer Daniel Pearl, and expert art direction is persuasively nasty… but somehow that buzzing saw doesn’t sound as scary as it used to.
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58The gruesomely unnecessary remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is such a smorgasbord of slimy grunge that to call the movie gross wouldn't do it justice -- it's downright sticky.
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50Chainsaw is produced by Michael Bay (Bad Boys I and II), which explains its soullessness. But nothing explains the flaw in this bad boy: How can a movie scare you when you’ve seen it all before?
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50A lot more violent and a tad less creepy than the 1974 original, the much-changed remake delivers enough gory, belligerent mayhem to keep horror fans screaming.
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50Director Marcus Nispel, a rock video vet making his feature debut, knows how to ratchet up the tension. His remake is a far, far better-looking thing than the original. There's also more humor, especially in the over-the-top performance of drill sergeant-turned-actor R. Lee Ermey as the loudest of the inbreds.
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The remaining twisted population that likes this kind of movie will enjoy a horror film that is surprisingly stylish.
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50The new version has a few jolts, some occasionally effective smoke-and-mirrors photography and a lead (7th Heaven's Jessica Biel) who could teach a grad course on walking provocatively in blue jeans.
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50As the eviscerations ensue, the truth becomes undeniable: This is easily the most gruesome, most pointless, episode of "Scooby Doo" ever.
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50Gruesome enough; what it lacks is a distinctive revolting personality of its own.
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50While it’s far from bad, it also falls far short of the icy frissons produced by the original.
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50Seems to understand its source material, but has no idea how to improve on it.
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40Everything that made the original Chainsaw a classic is ground into the dirt in this new version.
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40Still and all, the makeup special effects are as over the top as anything in Hooper and L.M. Kit Carson's 1986 Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, and -- for those of us without the sense to steer clear of this sort of thing -- that's saying something.
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40There's nothing wrong with remakes, but as this movie amply proves, there's often nothing right about them, either
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38This new, presumably improved Chainsaw is just as humorless as the original, but it's also slicker, glossier and resoundingly artificial.
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38Simply go out and rent the original. In the thin ranks of killer-power-tool flicks, it's still the standard to beat.
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33For those who've seen the original, no surprises will be unearthed other than an altered story (not for the better) and more gore.
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30An overproduced, video-director remake, slick and grue-marinated and loud as a sonic boom.
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30Rather than exhilaration, this bilious film offers only entrapment and despair. It's about as much fun as sitting in on an autopsy.
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30Initially promising, but quickly disappointing.
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Weakens, dilutes, disinfects and otherwise undermines the legacy of Tobe Hooper's 1974 original.
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25Significantly more gruesome and noisy than its predecessor, and boasting more nasty-looking fluids than all the works of David Fincher combined, this version leaves few corpses unturned in its unstinting campaign to please gorehounds.
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25I don't know if Nispel and Scott Kosar, who make their feature film debuts here, are the worst director and writer in the world, though they might well represent the United States if anyone holds a competition. I do know they deliver a total of zero laughs, scares or surprises in this remake of the infamously creepy 1974 picture.
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25Efforts to expand the envelope of grotesquery make the film repulsive and suspenseless, and it sorely misses original director Tobe Hooper's grisly, wily sense of humor.
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20This new SAW film is so utterly unimaginative it doesn't even count as hommage; it's just a smudgy copy of a still chilling original.
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20Offers the same crudely effective variation on the hatred and fear of hillbillies in "Deliverance."
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0A contemptible film: Vile, ugly and brutal. There is not a shred of a reason to see it.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 49 out of 73
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Mixed: 5 out of 73
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Negative: 19 out of 73
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AndrewG2Hardly produces a scare, or even a minute thrill. Poorly acted, poorly directed, and on a whole, very poor.