Texas Chainsaw Massacre - The Beginning Details

[Highly rated reviewer]

Awesome

I've never really invested my time in this cult movie until recently. I rented the remake and it had the same impact Saw did the first time i watched it. It takes films like the recent Wolf Creek to it's limits. I've been to see TCM: The Beginning last night at the cinema in the dead of night and that chainsaw sounds so loud it's awesome. This film goes a long way to explain how it started, and i was hooked from start to finish, even if i was cringing at the gore on screen. I won't give the plot away although generally the theme to film is already established. It certainly helped me point the finger to who provoked the massacre. A great film! Go watch, if you can hack it :-)

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[Highly rated reviewer]

TCM: The Beginning

It's not what it sounds like. If this had been, as is suggested by the title, the story of how Leatherface and his family first came to be then it might have been interesting. It's not. Instead it's just a bog standard slasher film, only because it's set before the other films (in1969) we know exactly how things are going to play out. Joy.

It's just terrible. The characters are cardboard cut outs who have no purpose beyond killing (Ermey, who gets the film's only good line, and Byrniarski) or dying (Brewster, Handley, Bomer and Diora Baird). There seems for a while to be an attempt at some depth as one of the boys burns his draft card and says he won't join his brother in 'Nam but it ends up as being a way of passing obvious comment on 'Nam and, by extension, Iraq and serves no real purpose.

The performances are beyond awful. Brewster seems barely awake and while the rest of the kids have less to do that's not to say they're any better at it. Byrniarski gives Leatherface no personality, but this isn't his fault as Director Liebesman films him so fleetingly all the way through that there's no opportunity to connect with the character at all. Ermey does seem to be having fun though, sadly this doesn't translate to the audience, but hell I'm glad someone enjoyed themselves at least.

But none of this is necessarily the death knell of a horror film, as long as it's scary a multitude of sins can be forgiven... guess what? Despite being so awash with blood and gore it's almost a surprise that the cinema floor isn't covered in viscera by the end there are precisely no scares in this movie. There's a total lack of suspense because you know all the kids are going to die (it's a PREQUEL people) and all the attacks are done in the most spectacularly obvious ways. There's a couple of ouch moments but when you are forced to live in the shadow of Tobe Hooper's original dread machine that just doesn't... ahem... cut it.

At the technical level things are largely fine, the film looks decent enough but it's completely without personality. I don't know who Johnathan Liebesman is and, frankly, I don't care, give anyone a Texas Chainsaw film and a budget and they could make a film that looked like this one. However the sense of period is completely fumbled. It gets off to a bad start by introducing the kids with Free's All Right Now, a great song to be sure, but a great song from a 1970 album. Worse than that though these people just look like they're from 2006. The haircuts, designer stubble and clothes all scream it and it's just one more thing that shows how lazy a production this is.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning is a boring collection of clichés that should never have made it to cinemas, do the right thing and ignore it and maybe films like it will just go away.