Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006)

- written June 2007

Summary: A boy has been born in 1939 and not minutes later, gets dumped in a trashcan outside the local slaughterhouse. Luda Mae Hewitt finds the boy and takes him home and raises him as her own with Charlie and family. Now in 1969, the slaughterhouse is closing, the town is basically abandoned except for the family and their murderous son, Thomas. Which means when 4 young adults pass through the town, they won’t make it out alive!!!           Overall: This might be the perfect film for me to a pro/con list. Let’s start with the bad news first. It’s almost impossible, inherently so, to make a film suspenseful if it’s a prequel. Consider the plot…4 kids trying to escape the bad guys and doing battle with them. Judging from the remake in 2004, you know everyone in the family is gonna live!! You can’t get past the fact the 4 will end up dead and the bad guys will make it. That’s just it. Can’t get around it. And so it makes prequels lose some steam once you recognize that!           In addition, the film starts off quite slow as it gives us our character and sets up the scenes at the house. And then they basically just quickly dump “the chainsaw” into Thomas’ hands, without any true connection. He kills his boss, without the thing as it is…but then doesn’t focus on how the instrument itself is important as he picks it up. Had there been a wrench there, I’m convinced he wouldn’t have treated that weapon any differently and hence our series would have a different title!           And finally, although the film fleshes out the relationship between the 2 brothers, we get nothing from the ladies…good or bad. We see a lot on Thomas and Charlie and nothing about Luda Mae.           And now the good…loved the scene with Chrissie ready to get out of the house, free and clear, to freedom, safety and then she hears the voice of her friend, Bailey. We see her stare at freedom and think about it…then she gives a look like “damn it, I gotta” with the idea that she may not get out alive, but it’s the right thing to do.           In addition we get a scene with Leatherface ripping the skin/face off a character. The scene is so well shot and believable, all I could think of was…what would have happened if they tried to release this film back in 1974? If you thought the orig film was gory and brutal…this is 10 times worse. Now granted we’re used to this now, mainly because of that film. But as the film progressed, it did get better!           As for our 3 alternate endings, the theatrical ending was the better one! With the narration of John Laroquette and the chainsaw death, that was fine. The alternate ones just weren’t worthy of the film and had they actually used the last of the 3…with Leatherface stabbing Chrissie with a knife, you could have downright forgotten any reference on “chainsaw.”           Comparison: Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets Easy Rider

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