The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
Directed by Marcus Nispel
After picking up a traumatized young hitchhiker, five friends find themselves stalked and hunted by a chainsaw-wielding killer and his family of equally psychopathic killers.
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15 films that influenced The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
What critics say influenced The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
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.
Even 1969's "Easy Rider" capitalized on such anxiety.
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.
Equally memorable is Ripley’s outrage when she learns she’s been set up by her employers – if Scott gives it texture, Weaver (in her first major role) gives “Alien” an edge you won’t find in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and its ilk.
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True, it has its sanguinary moments, but, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it gets its overall charge more from the constant threat of sadism than from anything we actually witness.
Without it there'd be no chainsaw torture sequence in Brian De Palma's "Scarface," for example, no blatantly "derivative" pieces like... well, "Pieces"--apparently "you don't have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre."
With its low-angle compositions, gradual evolution of animalistic antagonists (from opossum to kid to crippled man to monster), discovery of a feral child, claustrophobic sets drenched in water, and neo-feminist slant, what Marcus Nispel's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre resembles most is not Tobe Hooper's 1974 masterpiece, but James Cameron's 1986 masterpiece, Aliens .
Or is it just something Marcus Nispel saw Sam Raimi do in The Quick and the Dead (a send-up of Western shootouts) and thought would be cool to do in his horror movie?
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But at the same time, it's notable as much for the ways in which it is unlike other gialli as the ways in which it is like them, something of a hothouse for ideas in which some lines of inquiry were pursued and others ignored; in this it is to the giallo as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is to the slasher film.
While not as good as Tobe Hooper's claustrophobic, relentless, and influential horror classic from 1974, the slightly bigger budget remake of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" from uber producer Michael Bay ("Pearl Harbor") is, by all accounts, surprisingly decent.
Produced by Michael Bay ("Pearl Harbor") and Mike Fleiss, the new "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" has no pretensions about sneaking up on you - it simply charges, motor humming and blades flying, carving the spot where masochism and entertainment meet.
Audiences who didn't even know they wanted a remake of Tobe Hooper's 1974 horror classic "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" get it anyway, courtesy of producers Michael Bay, who brought us "Pearl Harbor," and Mike Fleiss, executive producer of TV's "The Bachelor."