Friday, December 7, 2012

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006)

I vaguely remember seeing this movie a few years back, but I can't recall any details about it, and I apparently never wrote a review.  Scream King is sick at the moment, and he's hogging the streaming Netflix in the second bedroom.  Therefore, I'm forced to tread through the mess of free Amazon Prime movies.  I've noted a few horror movies I could get into, and we'll start off with this one.

I actually loved The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake.  It's one of the better remakes that's come out within the past ten years or so, another being The Hills Have Eyes.  Remember Jordana Brewster?  She was such hot shit when The Fast and the Furious came out, and then she sort of just faded into obscurity.  But she's in this movie, trying to live up to Jessica Biel.  So the old meatpacking plant is closed down by the Texas Department of Health, taking away everyone's jobs and essentially killing the town.  Leatherface still wants to work there, though, and they are having a hard time getting him to leave.  In the meantime, a group of four attractive twenty somethings (Jordana Brewster, Taylor Handley, Diora Baird, and Matt Bomer) are heading to drop their boyfriends off for the draft to Vietnam.  Obviously this is a recipe for death, destruction and cannibalism.

Yay, Lew Temple as the sheriff!  He has been popping up in my life at random lately with The Walking Dead and all.  Of course R. Lee Ermey takes him out to gain his rightful place as sheriff, which obviously continues into the original remake.  Okay, good story flow.  We get kind of a repeat of the remake (ha!) as they stop at the same country store and ask to use the bathroom.  There is a gang of bikers this time though.  There's a forced accident and holy crap they are fucked.  At least they don't have a dead body in the car this time.

They get dragged back to the infamous cannibal house, where all kinds of atrocities await.  It seems they need/want the victims for food, but then I get confused as to why they torture them so much.  I mean, I guess there wouldn't be a movie without it.   Attractive co-eds are tied up, cut up, and made to run around the maze-like homestead.  They desperately want to save each other, but we all know how that goes.  I enjoyed how the ending was kind of the antithesis to both the original and the remake, all while linking it together.

Per IMDB, apparently there was never a plan to make this prequel.  But after seeing the remake, fans kept asking questions about how things came to be.  And they made a prequel.  Listen up Rob Zombie -- we want a freakin' House of 1000 Corpses prequel!

The second time around I actually liked this movie.  Maybe because it was much, much like the TCM remake. We like things that are familiar, right?  I'm also kind of a fan of formulas, and the whole TCM series sorta has that down. 

1 comments:

Michele (TheGirlWhoLovesHorror) said...

I love TCM: The Beginning! And not many people give it the props it deserves. The origin story for the Hewitt's was well thought out, R Lee Ermy is fantastic as ever, and the rest of the young cast is very likable and believable. Jordana Brewster is a hottie, so that helps too. Plus, the movie was just as bloody, if not more than, the wonderful remake, so what's not to love?


I remember when I first saw this being all surprised at the end when Jordana dies, and then going Pfft! DUH! Of course she dies, this is a prequel!