Post by StevePulaski on Jan 6, 2013 15:00:23 GMT -5
The iconic villain Leatherface returns in a less-than-iconic continuation of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Rating: ★
NOTE:[/u] Contains spoilers of the original 1974 Texas Chainsaw Massacre. No spoilers of Texas Chainsaw 3D are given.
I guess it has become a standard that I begin the new year by seeing a depressingly bad horror film. Last year, I was subjected to the lowest common denominator of entertainment by watching The Devil Inside. This year, I'm forced to slog through another bland, uninteresting, gory, suspense-less continuation of a classic horror film. Texas Chainsaw 3D is a hopelessly unnecessary film. A film that's first priority is to rob you of hard-earned cash by implementing a surcharge for its lame, underused 3D gimmick, and second is to give you what you already came for just in very, very modest amounts.
I'll debrief the history of Tobe Hooper's franchise for you. I doubt he expected it to go off like this. He first introduced the killer Leatherface in the original 1974 Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was met with rave reviews, several bans in different countries, and birthed the slasher genre along with Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. He followed it up with two sequels and a film bearing a subtitle called "The Next Generation," which jump started the careers of Renee Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey. We then received a remake in 2003, a prequel to the remake in 2006, further confusing fans and devoted cultists, from the company Platinum Dunes, and now we receive this mess that tries to follow up to Hooper's original but almost seems to intentionally bastardize itself from it. It is littered with unexplained inconsistencies, abrupt characters, and seems that it was written by people who only read the vaguest of "Cliff Notes" from the original 1974 film.
I'll enlighten you before I go into the inconsistencies. The story begins with a highlight reel of the murders from the original 1974 film, and then we are presented with the Sawyer home, the home of Leatherface, and the several people in it, being shot and burned to nothing by a group of enraged southerners. The only one who winds up living is Leatherface, only no one figures that out right away. A man discovers one of the Sawyer women has a young baby and is desperately hanging on to her life, and winds up killing her to keep the baby safe. He takes it home with his wife and raises her into a healthy girl named Heather.
Now Heather (Alexandra Daddario) is a grown woman, who has just been informed her grandmother that she never met died in her large estate, and after learning she is a "Sawyer," a name feared in these parts, her, her boyfriend Ryan (rapper "Trey Songz"), and two other compadres Nikki (Tania Raymonde) and Kenny (Keram Malicki-Sánchez) make the commute down to the large home to claim the property and what's inside. They too pick up a seemingly kind hitchhiker named Darryl (Shaun Sipos) at a gas station. Upon arriving at the home, she realizes it bares secrets just by the way it looks. It's only a matter of time before Leatherface is encountered and the madness ensues. It unfolds like you'd expect.
If you had any admiration or any fondness, more-so respect for the original 1974 film you should in no way take a liking to this film. It blatantly butchers the original film's ending by adding and subtracting elements that leave it in incoherent shambles. In the original film, there were about four people (five including Leatherface, if I remember correctly) that served as the sociopath murderers that resided in the Sawyer home that was seen burning down in the opening here. In this film, about ten people are residing in the Sawyer home when it picks up, so where did the overweight hillbillies and the infant child come from?
Also, the original took place in 1974. The film picks up twenty-three years after the events in 1974 and Heather is obviously twenty-three years old. This would mean that Texas Chainsaw 3D exists in 1997, but everything screams modern from the present technology, the gas prices, and the music. So if this takes place in present time, 2012, that would render Heather about thirty-eight years old and she is most certainly not thirty-eight. She's young, fresh, and fragile.
It's a wonder if the three writers for this film, Kirsten Elms, Adam Marcus, and Debra Sullivan, respectively, ever even saw the original source material because the film is disjointed from the film it's directly trying to follow that it would appear that they've only went in, pen in hand, with a vague idea of what they were making a sequel to. Even the head-sheriff (Thom Barry) appears younger in present time than he did twenty-three years ago. Texas Chainsaw 3D's biggest flaw is something I don't believe I've ever said about a film attempting to continue from its predecessor, but it's the film's lack of respect and loyalty to its original material. Yet I'm sure that many teenagers who will find a way to see this film won't mind. It would appear that a cohesive timeline is not even important to them. If they see attractive leads, some gore, and some gruesomeness, it's their new favorite film. "There was a Texas Chainsaw Massacre before this?" some will say.
Texas Chainsaw 3D is an abysmal horror film, light on scares, suspense, respect, tension, craft, and likable characters. Things happen in the third half that are most illogical on almost every character's part. The evil bad guys are the ones that murdered the Sawyer family, and the good guys are the ones that are defending the murderous monster claiming he's misunderstood and troubled. Could we forgive mass-murderers for their same actions claiming the same point? Tell that to their families. What a bloody, unforgiving nightmare of a film.
NOTE: John Luessenhop's use of the 3D is collectively mediocre at best. There's no sense of place, no use of it as a gimmick, and no reason for it. It's a lucrative process that is charging good people extra for horror films and must be stopped. I didn't give any money to RealD 3D last year, and I saw over one-hundred films. I hate to start 2013 off on a bad foot.
Starring: Alexandra Daddario, Dan Yeager, Tremaine "Trey Songz" Neverson, Tania Raymonde, Thom Barry, Paul Rae, and Bill Moseley. Directed by: John Luessenhop.
