the texas chainsaw massacre (2003)
			director:  marcus nispel jessica biel, eric balfour andrew bryniarski r. lee ermey, lauren german unfashionable observations rating: C+				Marcus Nispel’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is certainly no improvement upon Tobe Hooper’s 1974 original.  However, this remake is interesting if for one simple reason: we are able to see what 30 years have done to the horror genre.  Horror movies nowadays are a distinctly different animal than they were in the '70s and early '80s.  Watching this remake allows us to hone in on one important difference.  Nispel’s remake of the tale of a group of five young kids inadvertently besieged by a chainsaw-wielding madman confirms that horror movies today are not so much about horror, as they are about sex appeal.  Indeed, the first third of Nispel’s remake feels more like an Abercrombie & Fitch commercial than a slasher flick.  Of course, we know that sex has always been tied to the horror genre: movies like Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street easily come to mind.  But the sex in movies like Halloween was almost commonplace in its presentation—that is, the function of the sex scene was to serve as the background to the killer’s next action.  The sex scene was a means to an end.  Not so with this remake. While Nispel’s movie has no sex scenes (except for a quick back-seat grope-fest in the beginning), it is an undeniably sexy movie.  Perhaps it has to do with the fact that Jessica Biel stars as the scantily-clad heroine.  But even then, when the group picks up a female hitchhiker who pulls a gun out from between her blood-stained thighs, we instantly know that this is no ordinary horror movie.  The conflagration of sex and death is so prevalent throughout the entire film that it seems to supplant the story of the infamous “Leatherface.”  Sex and death, for whatever reason, seem to have a natural connection in storytelling.  (Indeed, Stanley Kubrick’s final masterpiece, Eyes Wide Shut, a neo-gothic horror movie of sorts, is a brilliant testament to this.)  The connection might have something to do with an innate existential expression of tragedy: we see young, beautiful, healthy twenty-somethings being killed off one by one by a diseased lunatic.  Perhaps it’s a comment on life’s contingent nature.  Perhaps it’s just a way to make $20 million at the box office.  Either way, there it is. Nispel’s movie channels these themes in a facially implicit, sometimes subtle way.  However, by the end of the movie, we are so displaced from the actual story line—what little there is of it—that all we can think of is going to the nearest Abercrombie & Fitch store to buy what those kids were wearing.  If we’re going to die, we might as well die with some sex appeal. I’d give Marcus Nispel’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre a C+.
	Unfashionable Observations © 2003