Michael Bay's Texas Chainsaw Massacre (DVD)

In Channel 4's 100 Scariest Moments programme, Tobe Hooper's 1973 original Texas Chainsaw Massacre featured in the top ten. I could never really see the big deal to be honest. For me, the original movie has dated considerably and where once we were supposed to be horrified, I could only really be amused. Thirty years later a remake was released upon a dubious cinema audience split between those who believed that the original could not be bettered and those who thought it couldn't be any worse. Personally, I generally despair with modern horror movies, most of which struggle to get an 18-certificate and simply aren't horrific. Well, with the release of this film, all that ...  Read the complete review

Tim Burton has a lot to answer for. Even since his poor, but finanically successful "re-imagining" of Planet Of The Apes, it seems Hollywood is falling over itself to produce as many "new" films using the names of classic ones, but little else. Few of these films have much in common with the original films, aside from an ability to trade off of an already established name. Unfortunately, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is little different. I suppose I should point out that I'm not particularly a fan of the original film, so this is a hardly going to be a "they changed ...  Read the complete review

The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre was inspired by 'serial killer' Ed Gein, as were many of the slasher films at the time (Halloween and Psycho for example) and was made in 1973. Three sequels then followed the original, the latest before the 2003 installment being in 1994. Michael Bay's take on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre would be subject to much interest by horror fans of the original generation and new generation of film fans being on the 30th anniversairy of the original. This incarnation of the film only contains Thomas Hewitt (Leatherface) from the original film. The other characters are based upon the originals and are given a new character, with ...  Read the complete review

"Cabin Fever" helmer Eli Roth said it best: "You don't f**k with the Holy Grail." Especially when the guys doing the "f**k**g" are bloatbuster helmer Michael Bay and Marcus Nispel, a pop-promo slickster who's never made a feature film. You can see it now- the lone female survivor stumbling into a blood-red dawn, a flock of helicopters arriving to napalm Leatherface's house. In slo-mo. Not so. Happily this "re-imagining" of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" is not the abomination everyone expected. It is, in fact, pretty good, especially if you can screw up your willpower to remove Nispel's take from the long shadow ...  Read the complete review

note: also appears in part on Flixster and The Student Room The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of those classic horror films that manages to aptly capture a sense of time and place like only very few offerings in the genre. Tobe Hooper became a legend of the horror genre as a result, and the film in many ways reflected the end of the counter-cultural movement, given how it was made in 1974, with a group of hippie-kids being mercilessly offed by a terrifying antagonist. The idea of a remake, further still at the hands of Michael Bay, angered a lot of people, although I do find myself in the minority of people who didn't hate it, even if it is largely ...  Read the complete review