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 ...

"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 ...

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 ...