So I rent The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, version 2003. I watch it with my roommate. He didn’t see the original, but we are stunned. We’re stunned at how bad this movie is.
I am shocked and appalled. Not by the graphic violence, no. If anything, the violence is boring. I’m disgusted by the fact that someone (Michael Bay) thought it was a good idea to remake a touchstone. I’m mad that redos of this sort are a common lot in Hollywood. And I’m mad that the film has no sense of humor.
The original film (dir. Tobe Hooper) is a brisk eighty-three minutes. The remake is fifteen minutes longer — and it takes a day for the movie to run its course. As expected, the cutting is rapid-fast, and the gore slaps you in the face. But it doesn’t fly. It doesn’t want to build suspense. (That would require creative thinking.) The sight of guts and gore is enough to compensate.
NOT.
The movie has characters and events that aren’t in the original. We see one contrivance after the next, the kind you get in a “We’re trapped in a horror flick and can’t get out” type of film. And the production design is perfect — too perfect. It really does look like they took this thing seriously. It’s so real, it’s fake; and the tint — wow. So many yellows and browns.
It looks like someone took a shit on this movie — an expensive crap.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) is scary. Things happen with the ease of what feels like real-time lightness. We aren’t clued to death. The remake starts stretching shadows and casting ominous backlight long before any massacre happens. In light of what comes later, this runs counter to feeling and fun. And the “skin-peel” on this new Leatherface? Over-designed.
I never thought I’d rue the lack of pretension in horror, but TCM-03 uses the wrong method in trying to scare us. Sure, it doesn’t poke fun at itself like the Scream team. Yet that doesn’t make it any nobler, or more preferable. By throwing all humor aside, it flubs the potential for scariness. In TCM-74, surreal touches make the elements of shock all the more jarring and effective (e.g., the granddad). The trick here? Without a sense of humor, the merely ridiculous soon becomes downright annoying.
My roommate’s ranting and raving made TCM-03 a lot more interesting than it deserved to be. Nowadays, he says, most horror films piss him off because they’re full of “stupid white people.” (Get Out [2017] is quite the corrective, isn’t it?) His remark might be derogatory, but I think he’s onto something. Whether he knew it, he described the rut these films are in. Made by idiots for idiots, they’re about idiots. We’re so keen for even the slightly good horror film that we find ourselves going to see dread remakes.
We are the problem. We can’t forget how good the good films are. We air it, and this is what we get.