We've Only Just Begun

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(There are spoilers for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning below; be forewarned.)

You know, I really, at one point in time, remember thinking that maybe they were gonna mix it up with this prequel to that occasionally-exciting remake of that bonafide horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; I don't know where I got that idea (or why I once even thought it to be an interesting idea), but I do distinctly remember thinking that a prequel to this story, seeing how Leatherface became Leatherface, could've been cool, and how it could've, in capable hands, been something uniquely horrifying.

I'm not arguing that they should crammed Leatherface into the standard biopic formula a la something like, say La Bamba (though that sentence, and the images it conjures, does make me snicker); but if the people making this prequel had had the guts to do something new and unique, if they'd made a real Family Picture about who these freaks are and how they live and came to be what they are, say a Grapes of Wrath where the grapes are eyeballs and the wrath is dripping out from the abattoir, well that could've been interesting.

But The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, as it stands? Blah. All they did was siphon any backstory or set-up into the credits sequence and first ten minutes or so, and then it leapt right into the tried-and-true formula of a group of kids stumbling into this cannibalistic Texan enclave with ramped-up gore and questionable moral contrasts with practically the same story progression laid out before us as the script hits each obvious mark.

There were touches I liked. I liked that this group of kids were not hippies, but on their way to Vietnam, and the spots where the script remembered that and used it were stirring. But mostly that got thrown to the wayside in place of the same gorehound schtick.

For example: They set up a character - the dark-haired guy whose name I never once got hold of - that "saw things" in his first tour of duty and is supposed to be haunted by that and his former, pre-war character comprimised, so that even his brother and girlfriend don't seem comfortable around him now, but they never did anything with it. In a better film - in a film that was even paying attention to the characters it's introduced and not using them solely as meat for the next special effect - this would've played out; we would've gotten to see how war had fundamentally messed this kid up; we would've gotten a scene where he loses it and debases himself as bad as this cannibalistic clan. But no, he's merely killed first - in a scene that was almost too well-done to stomach - so we can get a repeat of the "Leatherface is wearing your boyfriend's face!!!" scene we saw in the last film.

I get that that works, that it's effective; it's a horror beyond words, and it works in that way again even though they're copying themselves into the ground (indeed, I keep having trouble believing that anyone could even function, that anyone's brain wouldn't just check right out right then and there, if the man who killed the person you love was now trying to kill you WHILE WEARING YOUR LOVER'S FACE, but maybe that's just me). But it was disappointing in the way the entire film was, when they could've done much more, but chose instead the same paths over and over again. There's a humorous use of the phrase "Stay the course" in the middle of the film but, like that Bush Administration talking-point, it ends up meaning, to use a Democratic rebuttal talking-point, "more of the same."
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