X
- 2003
- R
- New Line Cinema
- 1 h 38 m
- 2003
- R
- New Line Cinema
- 1 h 38 m
Summary This thriller recounts the true story of five teenage travelers stranded in a rural Texas town, fighting for their lives against a chainsaw wielding madman and his bizarre extended family. (New Line Productions)
Directed By: Marcus Nispel
Written By: Kim Henkel, Tobe Hooper, Scott Kosar
- 2003
- R
- New Line Cinema
- 1 h 38 m
- 2003
- R
- New Line Cinema
- 1 h 38 m
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
38
6.7
Where to Watch
Summary This thriller recounts the true story of five teenage travelers stranded in a rural Texas town, fighting for their lives against a chainsaw wielding madman and his bizarre extended family. (New Line Productions)
Directed By: Marcus Nispel
Written By: Kim Henkel, Tobe Hooper, Scott Kosar
Where to Watch
Top Cast
Metascore
Generally Unfavorable
Based on 33 Critic Reviews
38
15% Positive
5 Reviews
5 Reviews
45% Mixed
15 Reviews
15 Reviews
39% Negative
13 Reviews
13 Reviews
Metascore
Generally Unfavorable
Based on 33 Critic Reviews
38
15% Positive
5 Reviews
5 Reviews
45% Mixed
15 Reviews
15 Reviews
39% Negative
13 Reviews
13 Reviews
What a superb job director Marcus Nispel has done re-creating, yet also revising, 1974's grisly, gristly, protein-centric masterpiece.
The 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.
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 179 User Ratings
6.7
57% Positive
102 Ratings
102 Ratings
25% Mixed
45 Ratings
45 Ratings
18% Negative
32 Ratings
32 Ratings
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 179 User Ratings
6.7
57% Positive
102 Ratings
102 Ratings
25% Mixed
45 Ratings
45 Ratings
18% Negative
32 Ratings
32 Ratings
I love this version of TCM. Gruesome. Funny. Authentic. Horrific. I highly recommend you watch this movie after the original.
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My favorite one out of the series. Just a group of friends on a road trip who pick up an injured hitch hiker. She commits suicide right in front of them all. They stop to get help but unfortunately it's in leatherface's town.
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Gruesome enough; what it lacks is a distinctive revolting
personality of its own.
A 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.
Simply go out and rent the original. In the thin ranks of killer-power-tool flicks, it's still the standard to beat.
Significantly 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.
A contemptible film: Vile, ugly and brutal. There is not a shred of a reason to see it.
[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]
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Deliverance meets The Hills Have Eyes in this sicker, meaner remake of Tobe Hooper's 1974 classic. It misses the point of the original as so many of the things that movie gets praised for aren't in this one. There's not even any indication that the Hewitt's are cannibals in this version. Yet if you're a **** for gore and grime there's still a decent time to be had here. You just have to deal with some pacing issues.
Things don't really get going until the extended chase sequence, which covers a wider variety of locales this time around. Until then it's just watching the five survivors ignore the incredibly obvious signs that something isn't right and getting subjected to acts of increasing cruelty. The events are so disgusting and sadistic that the whole thing feels more like a torture porn flick than a slasher film.
Let me tell you, the protagonists here are some real dummies. On top of the aforementioned inability to pick up on how sketchy their situation is, a few of them apparently have the attention spans of squirrels with ADD. Regularly getting distracted from their task of finding one another to poke around in places that don't make sense. Like how at one point a guy stops looking for his missing buddy and decides to scan the potential killer's refrigerator instead.
When all is said and done this is little more than a pointless, mean-spirited, and brainless bit of savagery. Watching people get tormented by backwoods psychopaths still has its appeal however. It's far from scary, but could very well make you wince and gag. Plus, even at its dullest it's more energetic than the original. Making it a fine alternative should you want a more lively take on the premise with an extra layer of filth added on top.
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Definitely better than most of the classic horror movie remakes out there, but it also suffers from disposable characters and continuity errors.
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Producer Michael Bay steered this remake of the infamous 1970's horror flick, without bringing in anything new. When I first saw the trailer for this version of the story, I thought it looked a lot like a hurried sequel to the contemporary silly release "Wrong Turn." Five youths on their way to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert pick up a young hitchhiker who commits suicide in the back of their van. Looking for help, and a little common sense, they stumble upon a weird family and their chainsaw wielding offspring. Much violence and such ensues.While the first TCM was not perfect, I eventually learned to love the shaky camera, lousy sound, and cheap look. One reason that film worked for me was the fact that much of the horror took place in blinding daylight, the cast was hot and uncomfortable, and it showed. In this version, even with the original's director of photography, most of the shots are too calculated. The horrors in the dark are not all that horrifying. This might be the rantings of a jaded horror film fan, but I never got the same feeling of unease as I did in the first film. Much of the original's story has been changed as film makers tried to keep the audience guessing by not doing a shot by shot remake, like Gus Van Sant's "Psycho." The absolute lunacy of the first film's family was strange enough, here the members are more dimwitted than scary. This lessens the impact of Leatherface's scenes. You know he is the worst it can get, you don't have an equally sick family to fall back on. One disappointing scene involves the heroine Erin (Jessica Biel) running to a trailer and meeting two women who will obviously not help her. Instead of being a tense moment, where mind games involving drinking a seemingly harmless cup of tea could be played out, the women are there for nothing more than exposition, blaming Leatherface's penchant to kill on being teased when he was younger for a degenerative skin disease. The five victims all meld together, Nispel's direction is okay, but the cinematography is too nice for this type of horror film. The black and white scratchy scenes recall TV's "Millennium" or "The Blair Witch Project." If I would compare "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" to anything, it would be the terrible sequels that came out after the original "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" to that point. Just one was watchable, "Leatherface," but with the exception of Part 2, they were all simply remakes of the original film. Most direct to video sequels do that now, and while this film tries to be something different, it is simply a remake that cannot match the original. As Leatherface and the clan enter a new millennium, their wrinkles were showing.
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Another Long March to the Slaughterhouse!
With a budget many times that of the 1974 drive-in classic on which it is based, Marcus Nispel's "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" delivers proportionately fewer thrills and no discernible suspense. It is, instead, a long march to the slaughterhouse that seems to take forever to get going and, once it does, goes nowhere that hasn't been visited before by more talented filmmakers.
Inspired as much by Jonathan Demme's 1991 "Silence of the Lambs" (from which it borrows its repulsively detailed inventory of a killer's lair) and by David Fincher's 1995 "Seven" (the bled-out color and atmosphere of decay) as by Tobe Hooper's original film, this movie seems painfully derivative just where Mr. Hooper's was technically crude but quite original: in its application of the psychology of horror.
Very much a product of its time, the original was a paranoid vision in which a band of hippies fell into the clutches of a monstrous family evolved from Richard Nixon's middle Americans. Mr. Hooper imagined the rotting nuclear family formed by the Sawyer clan (oddly renamed the Hewitts in the remake) exacting its final parental revenge on the flower-power generation, represented as a group of helpless children.
In the remake, with Hollywood's current master of budgetary excess, Michael Bay ("Pearl Harbor") as co-producer, the killings have little sociological or psychological resonance. This is a blunt and graphic gore film, replete with close-ups of splattered brain matter and twitching severed limbs.
To his credit, Mr. Nispel, a veteran of music videos making his first feature, does not take refuge in camp humor; he plays the violence as straight and as punishingly as possible. But punishment is not what the action public of 2003 is looking for: since "The Silence of the Lambs," the audience has been encouraged to identify with charismatic killers as they go about their business, something the remade "Chainsaw" staunchly refuses to offer.
From R. Lee Ermey's degenerate small-town sheriff to Andrew Bryniarski's hulking Leatherface (the chainsaw-wielding killer, now with a mask fashioned out of human flesh), the villains are either too grotesque or too remote to invite easy assimilation. Reduced to identifying, uncomfortably enough, with the victims (chiefly, the lovely but inexpressive Jessica Biel), the audience made its dissatisfaction vocally clear at a recent New York preview screening of Mr. Nispel's film, which opens today nationwide. Rather 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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Production Company
New Line Cinema,
Focus Features,
Radar Pictures,
Platinum Dunes,
Next Entertainment,
Chainsaw Productions LLC
Release Date Oct 17, 2003
Duration 1 h 38 m
Rating R
Genres
Tagline Inspired by a True Story
Awards
Fangoria Chainsaw Awards
• 4 Nominations
Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA
• 3 Nominations
Golden Schmoes Awards
• 3 Nominations
