I think that flicks featuring inbred cannibal families are officially dead, pardon the expression. I'm a big horror-flick fan, but now that I'm 30-something I want a little more from a cheesetastic gorefest than just flying body parts and "shaky-cam" cinematography. Perhaps Eli Roth has set the bar so high with Hostel that I won't settle for a quickie-flick like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. I have to say that I have not actually seen it yet and probably won't until it comes out on DVD, but I have read about 50-odd reviews of the flick and they all point towards several deal-breakers for an avid horror-movie fan. For one thing, the flick can't create real tension because we know for a fact that the main bad dudes won't be getting what they deserve because they're all in the 2003 remake, so all we would be left with is Whatever Happened To Baby Leatherface to chum the waters and that's just not enough juicy stuff to fill out 89 minutes. The 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Masscre suffered from way-too-artistic grunge design in my opinion, especially if you're a big-time trivia maven and you know that the dirt in the original movie was as real as it gets on a low-buget squat-til-they-catch-you movie set. Those guys were as stuck as the characters they were playing, working with real chicken parts and corn syrup blood in the Texas heat and dust. I found myself checking out Jessica Biel's cleavage just to see if the rivulets of sweat were consistent. The remake of The Hills Have Eyes also had too-pretty ugly stuff going on, and deviated from the original film by having constant interruptions from Mr. Exposition clogging up the unfolding of the unplot. Wrong Turn was just awful, but managed to achieve one single shock-you-to-the-core moment almost without realizing it by including a few baby seats in the pile of collected victim junk. I actually enjoyed The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III because it featured a Zippo lighter as the hero and adhered to the timeline set out by the first two flicks, but it was more funny than scary and never even attempted to try and recreate the atmosphere of the original. Between zombies and cannibals, zombies hold up much better to the test of time. Even a flick as baaaaaad as House Of The Dead was better than Wrong Turn, and the remake of Dawn Of The Dead was pretty decent until they broke all the rules and included a Zombie Baby, a giant no-no for us die-hard-die-good fans. Most horror flicks through the ages have had sketchy scripts at best; some of the most successful ones had scripts that could have been scribbled on cocktail napkins, such as Friday The 13th, Alien and The Blair Witch Project. The Texas Chainsaw Massare had a plot outline, scream cues and go-ahead-and-wing-it dialogue. These remakes try to have a script and Yeah, It Makes Sense backstory, and if Donald Pleasance taught us anything, it's that running around explaining stuff never works.
