The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) review.
It’s been twenty years since someone dared to remake Tobe Hooper’s classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Its legacy is more about what happened next than what happened here.
Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
Directed by Marcus Nispel
Screenplay by Scott Kosar
Starring Jessica Biel, Jonathan Tucker, Erica Leerhsen, Mike Vogel, Eric Belfour, R. Lee Ermy, Andrew Bryniarski and David Dorfman
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) Review
Remaking any movie is a risky proposition. It’s easy to ignore that some of the best horror movies of all time are, themselves, remakes. The Thing, The Fly, Invasion of the Body Snatchers… Some people argue Evil Dead 2 is a remake. It kind of is for a while but it really isn’t. Either way…great things come from retelling stories. Retelling stories predates the written word, after all. It’s in our nature to pass along myths and fables and narratives…putting a more modern spin on them each time. This is the story of a remake that changed the industry. Unfortunately.
It’s safe to assume that the more generations between an original film and its remake…the less likely the current generation of movie goers will have seen the original. The only part of the movie John Carpenter is remaking in The Thing I’ve ever seen was on Tommy Doyle’s television in Halloween. I have seen the 1950’s versions of The Fly and Invasion of the Body Snatchers…but I feel safe thinking most people haven’t seen the former. The latter is a classic…which makes it relevant to the topic at hand. Loosely basing a new film on a forgotten gem from decades earlier is easy. Remaking a classic is hard. No matter how many years have passed.
Coming only 5 years after the disaster that was Gus Van Sant’s Psycho…Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes production company would tackle another all time great horror film…Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. There aren’t many bigger risks you can take in a horror remake than that. Psycho was a worse idea…and it handicapped itself by wanting to be a shot for shot remake at that. But in the grand design of holy horror films…Chain Saw ranks very high. Unlike Van Sant’s commercial flop…2003’s Massacre reimagining was a big box office hit. That’s where the problem started. But we’ll get to that later.
Psycho (1998) was more than a financial loser…it was even more bankrupt creatively. It had nothing new to say about the genre, or film; or even itself. Starring the best independent movie stars it could find…Psycho (1998) plays like an odd concept piece we might have seen filmed on zoom and released during Covid. The players can read the words…but they no longer have any meaning. And we can all just watch the original anyway. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) is not that level of creatively bankrupt.
This is not the part where I tell you that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) is good. It isn’t. It also has nothing new to say about the genre, or film, or itself. It’s a movie made to attract two kinds of people.
1. The throngs of new horror fans created by Scream in 1996. The kind that filled theaters for much emptier slasher movies the next several years but weren’t interested in where horror came from.
2. People who loved the original enough to be interested in seeing a new take on it…not yet jaded by the concept of remakes as they soon would be.
And it worked. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) made money. A lot of money. We’ll get back to that in a moment too.
The names have changed but the story remains the same. A group of young people find themselves confronted with a family of cannibals. This time they’re driving to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert…rocking out to and discussing songs that won’t be released for another year after the story’s 1973 setting. An early worry about the care that the filmmakers have put into this venture. Things settle down after that. There are different notes played to the same song…which gives us some inspired moments like a twist on the hitchhiker set-up of the original.
The creative team knows that you are here to see a giant man who wears other people’s faces as a mask run around with a chainsaw…so it gives you more of that. In doing so it changes an iconic, brutal, incredible third act into a routine chase scene. Erin (Jessica Biel) has a much easier time than Sally Hardesty does in the original film. Gone is the filthy, frantic, grindhouse aesthetic…replaced by the glossy sheen of an early aughts movie. The sweat and coloring tell you that it’s hot…but you no longer feel the world. A once vibrant concept now seen through a lens that is shiny, sweaty, and boring.
Excising the horror Sally goes through in the third act for a lengthy body discovery scene and a standard slasher chase scene sees this remake borrow more from the movie the original inspired than the original itself. The things that made Hooper’s version a masterpiece replaced by the things that made the genre it helped inspire tired and unsustainable. Outside of a few inspired choices…The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) is just another slasher movie. Which…still makes it one of the better remakes of its time.
That’s the biggest issue with the movie. Nothing inside of its bookend John Larroquette narrations is egregious or sacrilegious. It’s just…basic. When you look at that in terms of remaking one of the most important and groundbreaking horror films in history…it’s a disappointment. When you take it as a 98-minute slasher movie from the early 2000’s…it’s pretty good. The problem, you see, is not the movie itself. It’s what happened next.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) opened at the top of the box office. It went on to gross over 100 million dollars on a budget one-tenth the size. A certified hit. And the catalyst for a near decade of similar cash in attempts. If there was a horror movie that Hollywood could remake…it did. Platinum Dunes itself was responsible for remakes of Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Amityville Horror. All big successes. Mostly trash.
April Fool’s Day, Black Christmas, Carrie, Children of the Corn, The Crazies, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Evil Dead, The Fog, Fright Night, Halloween, The Hills Have Eyes, House of Wax, I Spit on Your Grave, The Last House on the Left, Maniac, My Bloody Valentine 3D, The Omen, Piranha 3D, Prom Night, Silent Night, Sorority Row, The Stepfather, The Uninvited, When a Stranger Calls, The Wicker Man…
That’s not even a full list of remakes we saw in the ten years that followed the success of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003). It became so out of control that Scream 4 was made, in part, to comment on the lack of original ideas and the nature of remakes. Now…not all those movies are bad. There are some fun ones (The Crazies, Piranha 3D), some good ones (The Last House on the Left, Dawn of the Dead) and some legit great ones (Evil Dead, The Hills Have Eyes). How many surpassed the original? I don’t know. Maybe The Hills Have Eyes? How many had nothing new to say? Most of them.
A decent slasher movie for 2003 kicked off the worst period of horror because it happened to be a remake of a vastly superior film. I don’t know how much we are allowed to hold against it for that. But I choose all of it. Fair or not. The movie simply isn’t good enough to warrant starting an entire film movement…and it isn’t bad enough to warrant the onslaught of anti-creativity left in its wake. The truth is…The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)’s deserved legacy is that it did more harm succeeding than it did existing. Which, sadly, makes it one of the better remakes.
Scare Value
As far as remakes go…The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) is fine. There are far worse ones. There are a few much better ones. Even with a middling score it can lay claim to being one of the better ones from its era. And it is exactly that. Its era. The success of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) subjected us to years of soulless remakes. For every decent one that slipped in… a slew of horrible ones followed. Is it fair to assign blame for that to this movie? Probably not. … But it is its fault.
2.5/5
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