All Critics (89)
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Top Critics (18)
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Fresh (11)
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Rotten (80)
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DVD (21)
Gross and sadistic but never scary.
Attention sadists: Demand more from your gorefests than this pro forma return to the well. Has mass murder ever been this dull?
October 18, 2006
The story's been played out so many times.
All you need to know about the character is he's really crazy and carries a chain saw. And he's got an even crazier uncle who all but steals the film.
It's as remorseless and disheartening as any of the others, more gory and less scary.
No character, no commentary. Just slice-and-dice, pare-and-scare, scream-and-run and fall-and-die.
It's actually closer to the original Chainsaw than its immediate predecessor, but it still relies on more on physical torture than the psychological terror that made the original - or any genuinely scary movie - so effective.
This is the Texas chainsaw massacre, not the Texas chainsaw misunderstanding. Nothing castrates a bogeyman like cheap-Freud psychology, and Leatherface possesses no greater power than a hulking professional-wrestling heel. A low point in American horror.
Much less at the beginning, and much more a remake of the remake...
Bloody gore fest retreads old gruesome ground.
The original "Chain Saw Massacre" spoke, in unsettling terms, to middle America's growing contempt for the '60s counter-culture, but no deeper meaning can be ascribed to this mayhem. It's just a joyless technical exercise.
A rote latter-day slasher film with barely anything worth recommending.
...an ugly film, overwhelmed by transparent shock value, short-sighted storytelling and nihilistic undertones.
...unsightly, pointless, and thoroughly mean-spirited...
A garden-variety horror movie that provides no innovation on the old "kids stranded in the woods with a scary monster" plot.
Audiences will start playing the 'Who's Next' game as people run, scream and die, and the whole thing loses the power that this horrific creation once had over cinema.
The focus in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning isn't on the confrontation of demons, moral reckoning, or terror. It's an unimaginative exercise in suffering.
85%
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Top Critic
