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October 26, 2006

Movie Review

Massacre of a Movie

Cheap scares should end with ‘The Beginning’

Story by: Alyssa Fry

The Shorthorn Scene editor

After briefly wondering if my ability to become engaged in movies was lost, I realized I was making excuses.

With a name like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, this hour-and-a-half-long excuse for a prequel revealed little about Leatherface I didn’t already know.

Yes, he’s a murderous psychopath with an affinity for portable power saws. Yes, he has an equally psychotic inbred family. Yes, a bunch of skinny, good-looking kids get tortured in rural Texas. But wasn’t the 2003 remake enough?

I’d argue that fans of this horror icon weren’t dying to know how he came to use a chainsaw or whose face he sewed together to cover his own. Several details about his birth were new but didn’t add much.

The killings that started it all were of two couples (obvious?) traveling through Texas for one last road trip before the two guys had to head off to Vietnam. Corny professions of love and dramatic talks of the war are laborious to sit through, and a biker couple later becomes involved for no other purpose than to add more blood.

Jordana Brewster, the only semifamous cast member, has the advantage throughout most of the movie of not being tied up inside the eerie mansion. Determined to save her soldier, she enters the labyrinth and soon discovers just how twisted the inhabitants are.

Only a handful of flinch-inducing scenes punctuated this gore-fest, but they were cheap scares, like when a burst of shrill music happens as a person suddenly comes into view from the side.

This film misses the mark from the beginning credits, with distorted images of blood and raw meat, to the end, with a sudden narration by a serious man about the killings.

Horror has been a slowly decaying genre for some time now, and this effort shows directors don’t think they have to try. After being beat over the head with a bad script and minimal scares, I left a little more certain that horror movies are continuing to be made out of habit and, as a result, do nothing for viewers hoping for a fright.

Maybe psychological horror movies just frighten me more than the bloody ones do, or maybe I’m just making excuses again.