Flak Magazine: Review of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 10-30-03

The most licentious shot in recent memory comes from director Marcus Nispel and producer Michael Bay in the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: As a hitchhiker shoots a gun into her mouth, Nispel trails the bullet's path from the chamber, into her mouth, through the hole in her brain and out through the blood-splattered back window. This is not obscene because it's disgusting; it's obscene because there's no real reason for it. Is this hole in her brain a surrealist attempt to peer into the subconscious? Or is it just something Marcus Nispel saw Sam Raimi do in The Quick and the Dead (a send-up of Western shootouts) and thought would be cool to do in his horror movie? Considering this and several other derivative shots (the camera being dropped during some Blair Witch-style grainy footage, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2's power tool crotch shot and The Silence of the Lambs's skin mask among them), the evidence suggests the latter.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre sits in theaters right next to Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino's controversial ultra-bloody samurai movie. The key question in that debate is whether Bill has enough artistic merit to elevate it above obscenity, but you can't ask that about Massacre: This exploitation piece has no artistic ambition. In fact, the Massacre remake labors to de-aestheticize itself. The new screenplay is cleansed of the layers of subtext and suggestion that marked the original as a masterpiece of horror, instead working very, very hard to gross out teenagers. To this end, the remake occassionally succeeds in eliciting gasps, but they're nothing but pure shock; the emotions do not lie in dread and existential horror, but only in momentary repulsion or the body's reaction to loud noise.

The original Massacre is the story of Sally, her boyfriend Jerry, her friends Pam and Kirk and her brother Franklin, who uses a wheelchair. The siblings are searching for their grandfather's grave, which they think has been vandalized. While in the area, they revisit their childhood home — outside of which vandals are, literally, digging up the past. Sally and the gang aren't particularly likable, especially the pain-in-the-ass Franklin, though his pouting is somewhat understandable because of his sister's annoyance with him. Sally wanders through their childhood home with her boyfriend, reliving memories of the past, but as she most likely did as a kid, leaves Franklin forlorn downstairs, upset and lonely. You can feel the punishment coming; the gang's retribution at the hands of Leatherface could easily be read, on one level, as the punishment wrought by the freaks on the cool kids. Yet, considering the film's allusions to the Manson murders, Leatherface could just as easily represent the rejection of moral reasoning in a time of social upheaval.

Compare this to the slaughter of the remake's gang of teenagers. First off, these are not '70s teenagers; they are Gap Models masquerading as hippies, especially the boyfriend character, with his faux mechanic's shirt, machine-frayed baseball cap and great abs. These kids are on their way to get high at a Skynyrd concert, not delving into the psyche of scarring childhood memories. There's some generic relationship plot, but the story is so varnished that the film loses the raw energy of the original. These kids are all right — other than just having a good time, they've done nothing wrong except to be cool in ways the current teenage audience might find cool. But because good horror villains always represent the dark side of the attacked, what's left here for Leatherface? Jessica Biel's character is the most moral in the movie, so why her friend must be crucified for her sins on a meathook is beyond comprehension ("Please forgive me," he says while dripping blood on her head). Upon closer reading, the image makes no sense, and the details of the gore (including the crucified playing the piano with his toes) just feels all the more exploitative.

As for that hitchiker, Nispel suggests something appropriately sinister: The girl is bloody in the crotch and obviously distraught. But Nispel doesn't deal with the rape image he himself brings up. This should be something weighty and horrible, but the subsequent suicide is merely a vehicle for an extended side plot involving the cleaning of blood and brains from automobile upholstery. In addition to Nispel's brain-hole shot, there are funny but empty attempts at black humor when R. Lee Ermey (as the crazy local sheriff) makes the boys help him wrap the body in Reynolds Wrap, and when the body is tossed around for a humorous "thud" sound. Contrast this with the hitchhiker in the original, who cuts his own hand and cries with something between pain and joy. It turns out that this guy is completely numb from working in the slaughterhouse; this scene carries on for several tense minutes before he cuts himself, which creates more tension in that little cut and in the entire mess created by the gunshot girl.

In fact, the hitchhiker's slaughterhouse story is the key to the first film. Not only does it set a queasy tone for the whole film, but it lets director Tobe Hooper comment on the mass violence buried underneath mass consumerism. When they pick up the hitchiker, he talks about having spent his life firing bolts into cattle brains to the point that he's totally desensitized — slicing his hand is an attepmt to simply feel something. The kids, recognizing that he has no chance of re-entering normal society, dumped the hitchhiker by the side of the road; combine that with his fatigues, and it's easy to see that Hooper is evoking the situtation of young Vietnam veterans who witnessed mass killing, only to be rejected by society at large.

Compare this to the plot of the remake, which jettisons the slaughterhouse conversation in the van for a party atmosphere. The kids are on their way to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert with a piñata full of pot and a sexy, slutty stranger in tow — hippie behavior for sure, but without the framing of the original, the movie has no context except for its plea of hipness to the mall crowd. Stripped of any attempts at meaning, Biel's encounter with Leatherface in the slaughterhouse is just exploitation — a sweaty chick in a white T-shirt running from a guy with a chainsaw between sides of beef.

New Yorker critic Bruce Diones called Bay's Bad Boys 2 "action porn," and it seems like Bay is using his producing career to expand the definition. Here, there's no artistic intent, no impression of the original's place in cinema as a context for today's horror films, no connection drawn between the social turmoil of then and today, nothing. Bay and Nispel's film aims square at teenage detachment and exploits it for superficial screams and groans. Some may speak of Massacre's "style," but if the film doesn't hold up to close reading even on a minimal level, then the buckets of eyeballs, salad bowls of blood, salted bloody limb stumps, projectile vomiting and quivering severed limbs are simply depraved images and nothing more. At least Jerry Bruckheimer, the megaproducer who launched Bay's directing career, manages to occasionally work in some crazy politics while he's exploiting the audience. Bay just wants to exploit viewers and get them out of the theater as soon as possible — like a bullet through the brain of moviegoers.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)