The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning -- 2006 -- R

I know there's an unrated version of this one, but I think I got the R rated version.

This is a prequel to the curiously popular Texas Chainsaw Massacre film; this prequel is actually specific to the 2003 remake as opposed to the 1974 -- sorry to say -- classic. What the original film had was lots of shock value, and while our shock receptors aren't on as high as they used to be, this one does have a good point or two about it in that it at least plays out better than the original.

It is subtitled "The Beginning" indicating that we learn about Leatherface (a.k.a. Tommy) and his family's killing spree prior to the original film, kind of tauting the "how we got there from here" idea. When it comes to this notion, we do get the beginning of Leatherface, but only in the form of his weird birth in a local slaughterhouse, his being dumped in a dumpster and then subsequently rescued. We get a series of photographs of him growing up and then we're about 3 years before the original film, and big surprise, he's working in the same slaughterhouse where he was born...I wonder if he knew this. The slaughterhouse is shut down by the health department and Tommy decides he's not going to be thrown out by the crass-talking so he kills the owner...and then leaves. We also get a rather stomach turning scene where Tommy's mask is replaced by his human-leather face.

Enter normal slasher-land where we meet four typical late-teens. We get the Army guy who's going back to Vietnam, his brother who is being drafted and doesn't want to go, and their girlfriends who are traveling down to Fort Something with them. Unlike the original where the group stops at a house and invades it before checking out the house next door and invading it too, this group is driving down the road only to be accosted by bikers and such, until one of them wants to rob them. Well, like a good stereotyped grunt, the kid pulls a gun out of the glove compartment and takes his eyes off the road long enough to run into a cow that he should have seen from a mile away on that long, flat stretch of road.

This causes a little accident and they're picked up by our feux sheriff of the bad guys' house of death (he knocked off the real sheriff earlier). So now they are all dragged into the house to die, instead of walking in there on their own. This section of the film creates a real feeling of hopelessness and plain unfir cruelty. What's the worst that could happen? Yeah, they get that part down pat. While character development is minimized, the things these characters endure creates that sympathy vote, since you don't want stuff like this happening to anyone. They actually try to escape at every opportunity instead of hanging out and waiting for the bad guys before trying to get away. The bad guys use every cruel method at their deposal to keep their prey trapped.

Compassion is, of course, the undoing of our characters as it is for a lot of horror movie characters, and to be honest, we wouldn't respect them if they didn't have this. Too often, they have escape in their grasp but feel the human need to save their comrades. Do their friends stand a chance at survival? Are they dead already? Is that a scream I hear? That basic human need to save someone else is at a constant high here and makes you wonder whether they shouldn't have just been selfish and deal with our contempt.

Beyond these improvements over the original storyline, they copy a great deal of it. The dinner table. The escape by jumping out a window. The general grotesque hopelessness of the whole ordeal, and of course, the multi-hundred-yard dash from Tommy and his trademark never-runs-out-of-gas chainsaw.

So this is a mixed bag of a film. It has some improvements over the original that make it a better viewing, but at the same time, it offers very little new material to make it unique. Sure, we get the backstory of the lesser horror icon of Leatherface, but is that enough to sustain the movie as a milestone? Not really. Despite its backstory, the movie isn't unique and uses a slew of horror standards to tell its tale. I'll give it props on a unique ending in the horror world, but for the most parts, it's just another slasher.