'Texas' Massacres Screen
‘The Beginning’ serves a chopped-up prequel

By Leo D. Rommel


The idea of a horror prequel is annoying.
We know what’s going to happen before it happens. We know the outcome of the film before the credits roll.

And in this case, we know from the beginning that nobody from the family of maniacs in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning will die because we already saw them alive and well in 2003’s original remake.

That means we know Sheriff Hoyt (R. Lee Ermey) lives to see another standup comedy day and Leatherface (Andrew Bryniarski) will get countless more opportunities to fillet a co-ed. The primitive torture of the hunt has been picked clean from the material by greedy producers who want to bleed some more coin from the 32-year-old iconic franchise.

In The Beginning, a convergence of some highly improbable circumstances leads the main characters to their imminent doom. The four main characters find themselves in dire straits not because they have slept with one another (per the rules of most slasher films) or otherwise mouthed off to the wrong person, but because they are being robbed by a lone female on a motorcycle. When they attempt to outrun her on a deserted country roadway, they inadvertently collide with a cow and thus crash their SUV spectacularly.

The film then adds insult to injury when it makes Chrissie (Jordana Brewster), the only non-hostage character and the lone hope any of the victims have of surviving, dumber than just about every horror heroine in the genre’s history. Whether Director Jonathan Liebesman felt that these characters were comparatively inexperienced since the film is set in 1969 or just assumed audiences wouldn’t mind that Brewster was dumb as nails, he does the film a disservice. The characters are only victims, not legitimate survivors.

In other words, they’re so unsympathetic that we don’t care whether they live or die.
This is your typical scantily-clad-hot-babes-with-big-breasts-running-and-screaming-at-the-top-of-their-lungs-until-they-are-savagely-and-grotesquely-murdered film. It does not shed much light on the origin of the iconic villain except for the fact that he was an abused child, and if everyone had just been nice to him when he was an awkward, self-loathing kid, there never would have been even one chainsaw massacre, let alone two or three.

Essentially, this film is everything that its predecessor was not: slow, bland, unreasonably violent and just all-around nauseating. That’s not to say that the two films – and, in fact, the 1974 masterpiece that started it all – do not share some of these qualities, which in some measures can prove effective. But this prequel stands out more as an example of the current trend in horror: focus on blood and guts and not on scaring the crap out of a crowd.

This film raises the bar — or lowers it, depending on your point of view – by documenting the brutality of the killing spree, and all but forgoing the truly frightening moments. The punctuative riffs from the first film return, yes, but they feel forced, and ultimately, false when exploited here.

Likewise, the film also carries on the newfound trend of having the villains rather than the victims serve as the focal point of the story. As with Freddy in the Nightmare on Elm Street series or Jigsaw in the highly successful Saw trilogy, the storytellers are far less interested in who inhabits the “innocent” roles than what can later be done (via the bad guy) with their still-warm bodies.

Really, how good can a storyline be when the protagonists aren’t supposed to stand a fighting chance?

The initial problem with the movie is that it is structured almost identically to the original films, which makes it a copy of a copy. Its formula is so routine, it’s almost a comedy at this point. The idea of more idiotic kids getting lost in the hidden interstates of Texas, running around a scummy house making bad survival decisions and lining up for the slaughter is, frankly, quite boring.

Nonetheless, if watching people having their faces cut off and having their throats tenderly slit is your idea of a horrific good time, you’ll certainly get your money’s worth here.
Even if all the real meaty parts were used up the first time around.