Tell me again while this called The Beginning? I'm not quite sure I get the logic behind it. It seems to me that they couldn't come up some sort of tagline for it, so they slapped on a little pre-credit sequence which also saves them from having an ending. Don't get me wrong, the blood was nice to see on the big screen, but this could have used a little bit more than that.
Horror fans are a group of people who like abuse. They like to be scared, they like to see people get cut and bloodied, terrorized and chased. Besides having an obvious dedication to the genre, they are a long-suffering lot. There are more and more horror, and horror-related, movies being made; some get the big screen treatment, some are sent directly to the DVD shelves, and some suffer the fate of being called a Sci Fi Channel Original. The problem is that so many of these films are bad. I forced myself to sit through a number of stinkers over the years, a number I am sure is dwarfed by the experience of many of you reading this. What does this have to do with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning? Well, it means that if we can sit through some of those turkeys, we can sit through this and actually think it is a halfway decent movie.
With the lack of good horror coming out of Hollywood these days, I have found my standards lowering at times to allow myself the enjoyment of a horror film that a decade ago I may have just passed over. I have a feeling that this has colored my perception of horror films. I have yet to decide if this is a good or a bad thing — am I letting myself get suckered by sub-par movies, or am I just open to other experiences? I don't know.
Back to the matter at hand. I am not ashamed to say that I enjoyed the 2003 take on the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; I also am not ashamed to say that I do not place the original on the same pedestal as do others. I enjoy it, to be certain, and recognize its place in the history of horror, but I do not love it. The remake was a stylish, grueling, and beautifully shot exercise in horror, and much better than I had expected it to be. Now, we are three years out and it was decided that it was time to revisit the twisted world of the Hewitt family.
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