Marcus Nispel
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The popularity of Conan the Barbarian peaked during the early 1980s, with no fewer than three monthly comic books to go along with the books and the first Arnold Schwarzenegger movie .
The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
Directed by Alexandre Aja
influenced by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
Plot Themes
Heck, Craven's overpraised original itself was a rip-off of Tobe Hooper's superior "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."
But despite these shortcomings, this is the most satisfying horror remake since Marcus Nispel's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), and like that film, it fills in some blanks the previous film did not.
"The Hills Have Eyes," a brilliantly reimagined version of Wes Craven's 1977 micro-budget horror classic, is unrelenting in its brutality and contains imagery as disturbing as anything seen on mainstream movie screens since "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974).
Ce dernier reprend d’ailleurs quelques éléments du remake somme toute respectable de The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Evil Dead (2013)
Directed by Fede Álvarez
influenced by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
Visuals Themes
Sam Raimi, the Detroit-born director of no-budget 1981 classic “The Evil Dead,” understood that, effectively blending camp comedy and scares like no filmmaker since Tobe Hooper redefined the concept of familial bonding with “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
Whereas Raimi's initial Evil Dead gave off a sense of its filmmaker's irrepressible fun in making it, Alvarez's version gives off a vibe of ruthless efficiency, earnestly establishing its cred with the brand of grimy grottiness modern viewers expect from remade '70s and '80s horror films (the redos of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and much of Wes Craven's resume) before moving on to gonzo horror with astonishingly disgusting imagery.
While some are pretty cool, like Alexandre Aja’s “The Hills Have Eyes,” others (like “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and Rob Zombie’s atrocious “Halloween”) have been really awful.
In "Conan the Barbarian," the latest attempt to bring the muscular hero of the pulp novels of Robert E. Howard to the big screen (following John Milius' 1982 classic of the same name that made a star of the then-unknown Arnold Schwarzenegger, the lame family-friendly 1984 sequel "Conan the Destroyer" and the appearance of an ersatz version featured in the ludicrous 1985 take on Howard's "Red Sonja," enemies are crushed and driven before us in enormous numbers but the greatest lamentations are likely to come from fans of the character as they once again watch Hollywood screw up what should have been a sure thing.
Arnold went on to portray Conan in two increasingly disappointing movies: 1982's amusing "Conan the Barbarian" and 1984's godawful "Conan the Destroyer".
The People Under the Stairs (1991)
Directed by Wes Craven
influenced The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
Themes
Hooper made this theme even more obvious in his 1986 sequel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, an openly political film that savaged Reaganism with a furious glee only ever bested by Wes Craven's blistering anti-Reagan, anti-Bush (the first one) The People Under the Stairs.
"The People Under the Stairs" is an odd mix of "Old Dark House" mysteries from the '30s and '40s, the spate of cannibal-family horror films that followed "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" in the mid-to-late '70s and the zombie movies influenced by "Night of the Living Dead" and its sequels.
In "Conan the Barbarian," the latest attempt to bring the muscular hero of the pulp novels of Robert E. Howard to the big screen (following John Milius' 1982 classic of the same name that made a star of the then-unknown Arnold Schwarzenegger, the lame family-friendly 1984 sequel "Conan the Destroyer" and the appearance of an ersatz version featured in the ludicrous 1985 take on Howard's "Red Sonja," enemies are crushed and driven before us in enormous numbers but the greatest lamentations are likely to come from fans of the character as they once again watch Hollywood screw up what should have been a sure thing.
Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010)
Directed by Eli Craig
influenced by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
Themes Plot
Suffice it to say that "seeing how the other half lives" has been a horror movie convention almost as long as horror movies have existed; from Todd Browning to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, audiences have repeatedly been asked to rethink their expectations of oddballs and weirdos, in most cases "or else." (Hell, hillbillies basically wouldn't have an on-screen presence at all if city slickers didn't venture into their literal neck of the woods.)
This subversion of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wrong Turn tropes is reasonably clever and delivered with requisite tongue in cheek, and a late revelation about Chad's relationship to a decades-old massacre further pricks horror cinema's fondness for "return of the repressed" thematic concerns.
One of the best comedic horror films since Shaun of the Dead chewed up and spat out the zombie movie, Tucker & Dale targets the genre spawned by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: pics about frat dudes and nubile coeds terrorized, tortured, dismembered, sexually molested, cooked, and eaten (not always in that order) by inbred, cannibalistic hillbillies.
The moment the antagonists of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Deliverance or The Hills Have Eyes hit the screen, they're identifiable on sight as an unknown "other" to be feared.
Years later, Craig makes his feature directorial debut with a horror spoof that turns the murderous hillbilly genre inside out while poking fun at movies like "The Blair Witch Project," "Cabin Fever," "Friday the 13th," "Blue Velvet," "Fargo" and the granddaddy of them all, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."
In this goofy inversion of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, two innocent country boys (Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk) must defend themselves from a group of overly vigilant "college kids" vacationing near their cabin.
Midsommar (2019)
Directed by Ari Aster
influenced by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
Characters Plot
There is a figure lurking in the shadows of the film who is meant to signify the community’s depravity and single-mindedness, but the inspiration for that individual is so clearly an homage to a horror classic like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and to Aster’s own previous work, that it doesn’t feel particularly unique.
Beyond the obvious comparisons to The Wicker Man , its main scenario is deliberately reminiscent of films from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Hostel : Fish out of water get shot in a barrel.
The Cabin in the Woods (2012)
Directed by Drew Goddard
influenced by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
Plot Characters Themes
Slowly, sneakily, Cabin has become a combination of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Truman Show .
Not unlike the young people in The Evil Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Wrong Turn, Cabin Fever and hundreds of other films, they are a good girl, a slut, a jock, a smart guy and a stoner — a slasher-film version of The Breakfast Club.
Horror is chaos encroaching on order: when an idyllic summer afternoon drive becomes a nightmare, to quote the opening crawl from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or when the boogeyman comes, as in Halloween.
The collegiate crew headed for the titular cabin is a droll combo of archetypes from as far back as " Halloween " and, uh, "Scooby-Doo," and the unpleasantnesses they encounter bow purposefully to the likes of " The Texas Chainsaw Massacre " and, you know, " Friday the 13th " and stuff.
The outline is as crude as the title suggests: Hollywood has been telling us to be afraid of the backwoods at least since "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," and "Deliverance" (before that, it was the old dark manse on the hill).
Where X was dripping with lurid sex, vicious shame, and a mean sense of humor plumbed from Tobe Hooper's seminal 1974 slasher, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Pearl was a campy ode to winsome Technicolor children's movies like The Wizard of Oz and Mary Poppins, but with a dark undercurrent that reflected the devilish potential behind its titular antiheroine's wide-eyed ambition.
The pulp hero created by Robert E. Howard (who committed suicide in 1936) in the 1930s, was at the height of his cultural visibility in the 1980s, when the “Swords and Sorcery” movie genre resurfaced with such films as “Krull,” “Willow,” “Kull the Conqueror.”
Even 1969's "Easy Rider" capitalized on such anxiety.
Green Room (2016)
Directed by Jeremy Saulnier
influenced by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
Themes Visuals Plot
From here, Green Room escalates into a cacophony of tension and spilled viscera as the group try to escape from the skins, their struggle recalling the tagline on the original poster for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: “Who will survive and what will be left of them?”
The Ain’t Rights are a hardcore quartet who’ve been touring the country in a beat-up van straight out of Scooby-Doo (or, perhaps more fitting for this blood-soaked film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre).
The film follows The Ain’t Rights, a punk band that’s touring the country in a beat up van — similar to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
These ideas informed an entire way of thinking that would become the running joke of southerners throughout popular culture, ultimately inspiring the likes of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” – that is, movies where the underbelly of horror was often localized in wooded areas populated by inbred villains.
This film, like 1972's "Deliverance" and the infamous "Home" episode of the TV show "The X-Files," feeds into an urban phobia of small-town life, inbred hillbilly folk and alien geography.
Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Directed by Zack Snyder
influenced by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
Visuals Themes
Like last fall's revamp of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this Dawn eschews its source film's haunting simplicity in favor of a more bombastic modern-day sensibility.
While the movie passes on opportunities to touch on ripe-for-the-plucking social and political themes that linger around the edges of the plot (something last year's speed-zombie modernization "28 Days Later" did very well), it's smart enough and cinematic enough to have much more in common with great genre reinventions like John Carpenter's "The Thing" and Philip Kaufman 's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" than it does with recent trashy cash-in remakes like "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Thirteen Ghosts."
My biggest fear was that it would turn out to be something like last years woeful "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre"-an unpleasant exercise in soulless sadism that relied solely on repellent imagery to frighten audiences instead of any demonstrable filmmaking skill.
Like the recent remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Dawn Of The Dead had hefty expectations to live up to.
The same goes for 1974's influential The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which suffered the indignities of a tepid remake last fall.
The writers of Baywatch, Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, have been responsible for such slasher-film retreads as the 2009 Friday the 13th and Freddy vs. Jason .
Screenwriters Mark Swift and Damian Shannon cranked out the "Friday the 13th" reboot and "Freddy vs. Jason."
That sting lingers, and Baywatch has just enough going for it to make its ultimate failure feel like a botched attempt at C.P.R. Coming from a plethora of writers, including screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, the two minds behind Freddy vs. Jason and the 2009 reboot of Friday the 13th , this film has no idea what it is, the tone it would like to strike or who it has even been made for.
Director Seth Gordon (2013's " Identity Thief ") and writers Damian Shannon & Mark Swift (2009's " Friday the 13th ") check these boxes, then proceed to make the project their own.
Bones and All (2022)
Directed by Luca Guadagnino
influenced by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
Themes
The two share a meal of a freshly expired elderly woman that evokes Leatherface’s ungodly domesticity in the final act of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
Still, “The Northman” feels unusually thin, with less meat on its bones than 2007’s schlocky “Pathfinder” or your basic “Conan” movie.
As dim and dank as a power failure in a peepshow, Pathfinder is Apocalypto without the laughs or 300 without the muscular visuals and elevating dialogue.
Compared to the dynamic "Apocalypto," there is simply nothing in this film to hold anyone's interest.
"Pathfinder" probably has more similarities to Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto" than to "300" in that it's shot outdoors in natural settings, which certainly adds a lot more realism to what's just as much a comic book concept.
I'm thinking that instead of Karl Urban, why didn't the Rudy Youngblood of "Apocalypto" star?
Unfortunately for the film, this delay means it is coming out after the release of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto and Zack Snyder's 300, two films that it resembles rather strongly—and while Pathfinder would have been a bad film no matter when it was released, the inevitable comparison makes it look all the poorer.
I have heard comparisons made to both Conan the Barbarian and Apocalypto, but Pathfinder is so far below those movies in entertainment value that it feels almost criminal to include the titles in this review.
If this piss-poor lead role is any indication, former "Baywatch" hunk Jason Momoa (2004's " Johnson Family Vacation ") would have been better off staying at the beach than delving into a feature film career.