THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE

Leatherface is back and, once again, he’s wielding his weapon of choice.

CAST: Jessica Biel, Jonathan Tucker, Eric Balfour, Andrew Bryniarski, Erica Leerhsen, Mike Vogel, R. Lee Ermey

DIRECTOR: Marcus Nispel

"… a contemptible film: Vile, ugly and brutal. There is not a shred of a reason to see it. Those who defend it will have to dance through mental hoops of their own devising, defining its meanness and despair as ‘style’ or ‘vision’ or ‘a commentary on our world.’ It is not a commentary on anything, except the marriage of slick technology with the materials of a geek show…This movie, strewn with blood, bones, rats, fetishes and severed limbs, photographed in murky darkness, scored with screams, wants to be a test: Can you sit through it?… It wants to tramp crap through our imaginations and wipe its feet on our dreams…This movie is made with venom and cynicism. I doubt that anybody involved in it will be surprised or disappointed if audience members vomit or flee…Do yourself a favor-- Don't let it kill 98 minutes of your life." --Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

"… a long march to the slaughterhouse that seems to take forever to get going and, once it does, goes nowhere that hasn't been visited before by more talented filmmakers…This is a blunt and graphic gore film, replete with close-ups of splattered brain matter and twitching severed limbs…Rather than exhilaration, this bilious film offers only entrapment and despair. It's about as much fun as sitting in on an autopsy." --Dave Kehr, The New York Times

"Beware: Nispel's film challenges the stomach. Hooper created a sweaty, heart-pounding film through implied violence, preferring to keep his gore in the aftermath and his scares sadistically psychological. Nispel instead drags his prey through a Dante-esque ‘Inferno,’ a house of horrors -- at one point forcing Erin to find her friends in pieces throughout Leatherface's macabre workshop… the new ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ has no pretensions about sneaking up on you -- it simply charges, motor humming and blades flying, carving the spot where masochism and entertainment meet." --Robert K. Elder, Chicago Tribune

"Director Marcus Nispel, acclaimed for his ads and music videos, has a sharp eye and the good sense to hire Daniel Pearl, who shot the first ‘Chainsaw.’ But all the bad-rehash mojo from ‘Friday the 13th’ to ‘The Blair Witch Project’ has infected Scott Kosar’s script. Hooper went for primitive, Nispel goes for slick. Hooper went easy on the gore, Nispel pours it on. What can the actors do? Well, R. Lee Ermey as a local sheriff not above copping a feel off a corpse is wonderfully repulsive. But Jessica Biel and Erica Leerhsen have clearly been hired for their lungs, be it to scream or fill a tank top." --Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

"One week after critics dubbed Quentin Tarantino's ‘Kill Bill’ the most violent movie in film history, Marcus Nispel's unnecessary remake of ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ tops it… while most of the violence in ‘Kill Bill’ and its kin is cartoonish, ‘Massacre’ means what it says. When limbs get sawed off here, it's done with realism -- victims scream in genuine agony and die with terror on their faces…For the new generation of slasher fan, the remake is a true gross-out with plenty of satisfying frights. For the rest of us, it's one more chapter in a neverending story." --Jack Mathews, The New York Daily News

"Getting his first shot at a feature film, German commercial and video director Marcus Nispel has given the proceedings a desaturated, arty look and tried hard to be true to the original, retaining its early '70s period and many of its key sequences and effects.
But after three decades of ‘Halloween,’ ‘Friday the 13th’ and ‘Scream’ movies, the novelty is long gone. Efforts to expand the envelope of grotesquery make the film repulsive and suspenseless, and it sorely misses original director Tobe Hooper's grisly, wily sense of humor." --William Arnold, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"For his first feature, Nispel does a serviceable but bland job of holding your interest, but the result is an overproduced headache. To the remake's credit, it doesn't stint on the gore, but style sometimes literally obscures terror…While writer Scott Kosar has only a vague grasp of what made the original terrifying, John Larroquette's narration sets a legitimately chilling tone." --Wesley Morris, The Boson Globe

"… a splatterfest remake that relentlessly assaults the senses and mind with no discernable redeeming social value…Nispel and screenwriter Scott Kosar try to have their cheesecake and eat it, too. They simultaneously empower and objectify Jessica Biel, the star of TV's ‘Seventh Heaven,’ who, as the heroine Erin, looks like she stepped out of the pages of Maxim into a singularly grimy little Texas town of 30 years ago…That R. Lee Ermey, who hammily plays the lawman -- boasting about sexually abusing suicide victims while wrapping the corpses in plastic wrap -- gives the film's best performance is all most sane people really need to know about ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’…Just remember not to eat beforehand." --Lou Lumenick, The New York Post

"This is not a classic storyline that warrants an update. This is a movie about a guy with bad skin and a predilection for wearing other people's faces and killing people with power tools. But if you believe original director Tobe Hooper did everything right 29 years ago, and plenty of people do, why do it again? To call ‘Texas Chainsaw 2003’ pointless belabors the issue; after all, what was the point in the first place? But at least Hooper, with his utter refusal to make any concessions in the name of taste, infused his film with such wanton recklessness and brash energy that you knew that he, at least, was having fun." --Chris Kaltenbach, The Baltimore Sun

"The only possible reason for fashioning yet another version of Tobe Hooper's 1974 low-budget milestone is to make a quick-and-dirty weekend stomping at the box office…Except for the shot of a self-inflicted gunshot traveling through someone's head and a car's rear window, there's little in this ‘Chainsaw Massacre’ that's all that surprising…Those still having nightmares over the chillingly offhanded way Hooper's film handled helpless kids on meathooks will find that angle run so far into the ground in this version that its impact, as with the rest of the film, is rendered insignificant. The ending threatens us with sequels. Like we care." --Gene Seymour, Newsday