"TEXAS CHAINSAW 3-D" (2013)

Hollywood loves to teach old dogs new tricks.  Christopher Nolan re-imagined the “Batman” franchise, and Batman will never be that good again.  George Lucas rebooted “Star Wars.”  Now, Disney is preparing a new “Star Wars” trilogy, not to mention a reboot of “The Lone Ranger.”  The people who made the new entry in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” franchise are trying to teach an old chainsaw new tricks.   Numerically, “Texas Chainsaw 3-D” (** OUT OF ****) qualifies as the sixth sequel to Tobe Hooper’s landmark slaughterhouse saga “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974) that alarmed audiences with only half as much blood and twice as much storytelling.  Squeamish people should still avoid this bloodthirsty idiocy.  You get to see a grown man cut in two by a chainsaw-wielding maniac.  This same stout lad saws off feet at the ankles as casually as you would clip your fingernails.  He thrusts living people onto meat hooks and stores half-dead dames in freezers.  Yes, he wears a mask of a dead man's face. 

Basically, “Takers” director John Luessenhop and “Conspiracy” scribes Adam Marcus and Debra Sullivan, along with freshman scenarist Kirsten Elms, have abolished four decades worth of sequels, prequels and remakes.  You don’t need to have seen Tobe Hooper’s follow-up “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2” (1986) with Dennis Hopper to enjoy “Texas Chainsaw 3-D.”  Neither should you worry about Jeff Burr’s “Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990) with Viggo Mortensen.  Or for that matter Kim Henkel’s “Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1994) with Renée Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey.  For what it’s worth, Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel created “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” characters.  Let’s not forget “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (2003) that toplined lovely Jessica Biel or “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning” (2006) featuring “The Fast and the Furious” dame Jordana Brewster. Indeed, Luessenhop and his writers ask us to consider “Texas Chainsaw 3-D” as the new official sequel to the 1974 film.

Sounds like somebody got their chainsaws tangled up.  Not surprisingly, the opening credits occur against excerpts from the Hooper original.  Some actors and actresses reprise their roles, notably Gunnar Hansen, who once played Leatherface but portrays Boss Sawyer, and Marilyn Burns, cast Sally Hardesty in the original.  The filmmakers beg our indulgence when it comes to a realistic timetable, too.  This “sequel” doesn’t take place until 18 to 25 years later in the 1990s. Nevertheless, "Texas Chainsaw 3-D" looks contemporary.  Talk about stretching time out!   Luessenhop and company make a huge leap of faith.  In the process, they give us something far more horrifying than just another gore-soaked sequel.  “Texas Chainsaw 3” amounts to a revisionist sequel!  In the 1950s, for example, Hollywood rehabilitated Indian savages and converted them noble and sympathetic warriors wronged by society.  Essentially, “Texas Chainsaw 3-D” treats the murderous Leatherface character with the same compassion that westerns conferred on Indians in movies like “Broken Arrow,” “Apache,” and “Run of the Arrow.”  One scene near the end of “Texas Chainsaw 3-D” presents a tableaux with Leatherface and his only surviving relative that reminded me of George and Lenny from the classic 1939 movie “Of Mice and Men.”  This John Steinbeck movie concerned a mentally challenged brute and his intelligent guardian.  Horror has a new identity!

Altered time-lines or not, our heroine, Heather Miller (Alexandra Daddario of “The Babysitters”), carves up meat at a meat packing factory.  Little does she know what runs in the family.  When she isn’t at work, Heather spends quality time with her African-American lover, Ryan (Tremaine "Trey Songz" Neverson), who isn’t above cheating on her.  In fact, he cheats on her with her own best friend.  Bombshell of a babe Nikki ( Tania Raymonde of“Wild Cherry”), has no fear of being caught by Heather and does everything but flaunt their affair in front of her.  Moreover, Nikki has her own boyfriend, Kenny (Keram Malicki-Sánchez of “American History X”), who preoccupies himself with his culinary skills.  This quartet cruises off to Newt, Texas, in a van after Heather learns she has received an inheritance from a long, lost relative who she didn’t know she had.  Along the way to Newt, the quartet pick up a hitchhiker in the rain, Darryl (Shaun Sipos of “Rampage”), who has a secret case of sticky fingers that comes back to doom him.  When they arrive at the house on Homestead Road, grandma's lawyer, Farnsworth (Richard Riehle of “Office Space”) meets them, but declines to accompany them after they proceed through the gates onto the premises.

Heather is still reeling from the revelation that the couple who raised her weren’t her biological parents.  The father rescued her from the clutches of a dying woman when the Sawyers were gunned down by vigilantes and their home burned to the ground.  Anyway, the realtor hands Heather a letter and advises her to read it.  Naturally, Heather ignores the letter when her friends and she discover that this is no ordinary house but a palatial mansion with many rooms.  Curiosity leads to carnage when the man in the basement, none other than Leatherface (Dan Yeager of “Metal Heads”) himself, comes up to investigate and begins carving flesh.  He cuts his way through a number of people before he realizes that blood is thicker than chainsaws.  Heather grovels at his mercy as she was herself about to be slaughtered by the evil town mayor who precipitated an orgy of violence that brought her back to her destiny.

The switching chainsaws plot of “Texas Chainsaw 3-D” is imaginative stuff but this doesn’t happen until half-way through the mayhem.  Nevertheless, before the villain is rehabilitated, several people have joined the ranks of the dead.  The best scene—again out of any chronological time-line—has a curious deputy sheriff walking through the mansion following the smeared trail of blood with his wrists crossed.  He holds a pistol in one fist and an iPhone in the other, documenting his progress through the house down into the cellar where he encounters bodies carved up in all shapes.  Luessenhop generates a moderate amount of suspense and buckets of blood and gore, but “Texas Chainsaw 3-D” cannot cut it as the classic that the original was.

FILM REVIEW OF ''HIGH TENSION" (2003)

Scary films—like nightmares—shun logic. After all, what else would you expect from movies about vampires, werewolves, ghosts, zombies, mutated creatures, and sadistic maniacs?

Searching for logic in a scary movie is like skinny dipping in quicksand.

If the vampires, werewolves, ghosts, zombies, creatures, and madmen defy logic, their victims fare no better. Folks in horror movies behave foolishly. When they confront horror, they freeze in their footsteps and belt out a blood-curdling screams. Or they flee in the wrong direction, fall down, and sprain an ankle. Even if the girl doesn't sprain her ankle, she will run in a circle and collide with the villain. If the victims reach their car, they must crank up their jalopy repeatedly before the engine finally turns over, just as the monster or killer looms large in their rearview mirror. Indeed, the only reason that the engine doesn't fire-up the first time out is that it would make it too easy for the victims to escape.

Alas, horror movie villains are as unreal as they are undead, and their victims qualify as the least resourceful humans on earth. Now, keeping this in mind, do you watch scary movies to see the victims apply cold, hard logic to an illogical crisis while keeping a cool head under pressure? Anybody that goes to horror movies hoping that the villain will be realistic or that the victims won't do idiotic things clearly doesn't know much about horror movies and life-in-general. Some moviegoers love to berate the victims for their crazy behavior. If you saw a vampire, werewolf, zombie, mutated creature, or homicidal maniac, you'd probably freeze-up and howl, too. If logic has no place in horror movies, neither does realism. People ridicule creature-features routinely because Godzilla doesn't look like the genuine article. Has anybody seen a radioactive prehistoric monster? Werewolves aren't real, so how can they look genuine? Basically, criticizing horror movies for lapses in logic or lack of realism makes no sense. Criticizing horror movies as a type of movie makes better sense, and people who hate horror movies have no right to single out horror movies that abuse logic and defy realism.

The French horror movie "High Tension" (***1/2 out of ****) definitely gives both logic and realism the axe. As the best and bloodiest horror chiller since "Saw," "High Tension" qualifies as a ghastly valentine for gorehounds. First, "High Tension" narrowly avoided an NC-17 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, but the MPAA must have been in a generous mood when they gave this nerve-jangler an R-rating. You'll see more blood and gore on display here than those recent remakes of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "House of Wax," or nail-biters like "Bogyman." Second, director Alexandre Aja doesn't waste time with a lot of cheap false alarms to make the hair rise on the back of our necks. He is too busy showing a homicidal maniac killing people to indulge in those moments designed to make you jump when he can plunge you up to your neck into a blood-soaked situation.

Just for the record, don't see this movie if you are the squeamish. "High Tension" will scare the puke out of you. Aja doesn't pull any punches when it comes to depicting violence. The scene where the maniac breaks out a huge buzz saw that resembles something firefighters wield to free people trapped in cars illustrates this idea. The villain approaches a stalled-out car that his victim has flagged down on a deserted road. As the driver frantically cranks the vehicle, the maniac smashes the windshield then mangles the driver with this hideous weapon, turning the interior of the car into a bloodbath. In some horror circles, gorehounds call these movies splatter movies instead of slasher movies.

Actually, "High Tension" combines slasher with splatter for a bloodbath of a life-time. Plot wise, "High Tension" concerns two female college students in contemporary France who spend a weekend in the country to catch up on their school work. Marie (Cecile De France of "Around the World in 80 Days") and Alex (Maiween Le Besco of "The Fifth Element") cruise into remote Southern France where Alex's family live on an isolated farm house. No sooner has everybody turned in for the evening than a homicidal madman (Philippe Nahon of "Irreversible") barges into their house. This one-man home invasion army slashes the father, jams his head in the rails of the staircase, and decapitates the breadwinner with a piece of furniture. This madman opens the wife's throat from ear to ear like a watermelon and pursues the little boy into a cornfield with a shotgun. He shackles poor Alex in chains, gags her, and prowls the rest of the house in vain to find anybody else. Miraculously, Marie avoids detection in scenes of heart-stopping suspense. The maniac tools around in a rusty old truck like the monster drove in the "Jeepers Creepers" movies and sticks Alex in the back. At the last second, unbeknownst to the killer, Marie scrambles aboard with Alex. Marie resolves to save her best friend.

Before it's all over with, "High Tension" evokes chilling memories of the original "Texas Chainsaw Massacre." Compared with "Friday the Thirteen's" Jason or "Halloween's" Michael Myers, the maniac her make them look like pansies. Although the first hour or so of "High Tension" is a brutally straight-forward exercise in stomach-churning terror, the last half-hour takes a bizarre 180 degree spin reminiscent of the Brad Pitt movie "Fight Club." Already, Aja has been tapped to helm the remake of "The Hills Have Eyes." If you're looking for a movie that will make you scream and wet your pants at the same time, look no farther than "High Tension."