Dead Again

Saw her standing there: Jessica Biel awaits her doom.

Leatherface returns in a Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the '03.

by Cindy Fuchs

The images are indelible: A girl tears, screaming, through the woods; a monster chases her, roaring chain saw in hand. On its release in 1974, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre changed the way people thought about horror films. Shot for $140,000 with a manifestly amateurish cast, Hooper’s first feature went on to make over $30 million in the U.S. alone. A favorite of academics -- who see in it critiques of the Vietnam War, patriarchy, frontier myths and consumer capitalism -- TCM has inspired frequent homages, copies, sequels and remakes.

The latest of the last is, like the first, set in sweltering August 1973. It begins, again, with John Larroquette’s voiceover attesting to the film’s basis in a "true story." Scritchy sepia gives way to circa-’70s blondish color (the new movie is shot, beautifully, by original TCM cinematographer Daniel Pearl): five kids in a van, headed from Mexico to Dallas by way of Nowhere, Texas. The group consists of straight-ahead thinker Andy (Mike Vogel), his recent pickup, Pepper (Erica Leerhsen), annoying Morgan (Jonathan Tucker), driver Kemper (Eric Balfour) and his girlfriend, Erin (Jessica Biel who, with this role, can consider her much-publicized campaign to beat down her goody-girl 7th Heaven stereotyping complete).

As before, the kids are smoking dope, sweating and making out, ostensibly dooming them, until they meet the Hewitts -- that is, Leatherface (Andrew Bryniarski) and family, who set any standard morality on its ear. The meeting comes about slightly differently this time, as the kids pick up not Leatherface’s whacked-out brother, but a delirious girl (Lauren German) who, on seeing that they are headed in the direction she came from, promptly shoots herself (granting the film its most sensationally crowd-pleasing image). Unsure how to handle the body and trusting the locals -- including the predictably sadistic Sheriff Hoyt (R. Lee Ermey) -- the vansters are slowly sucked into one disastrous encounter after another.

As before, once inside, escape seems impossible, death inevitable -- familiar details include the cannibal family, the slaughterhouse, the Terrible Place adorned with human bones, farm animals and doll parts and the dreadful blood-slicked horror that turns Last Girl Erin into the same sort of brutal, canny, relentless monster she battles throughout. Though she must endure a couple of overwrought, big-music moments (such as a superfluous mercy killing), Erin is more overtly tough than the first film’s Sally (the excruciating and amazing Marilyn Burns), even borrowing a moment from TCM2’s more tomboyish Stretch (Caroline Williams).

The first feature by music-video director Marcus Nispel, the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre venerates the first film and its fans (going so far as to include a victim cameo by Harry Knowles), but also, smartly and disturbingly, accommodates its own moment. This even as it’s plainly cashing in on a brand name, putting its $13 million budget on screen in makeup and digital effects and borrowing from any number of more inventive films. As much as Hooper’s movie reflected frustrations and fears of the early 1970s, the new one speaks to an alarming upsurge in real-world horrors. It can’t do the brilliant work of the first, but it is its own nightmare -- recycling the past in a frightful present.

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)

the texas chainsaw massacre

Directed by Marcus Nispel A New Line release Opens Friday at area theaters

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