Review

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning
Director: Jonathan Liebesman
Writer: Sheldon Turner   
Cast: Jordana Brewster, Taylor Handley
Genre: Horror/Thriller 
Rating: R
Runtime: 84mins
Tagline: Witness The Birth Of Fear

The last scene of Tobe Hooper’s original 1974 Texas Chainsaw Massacre stays with you: the massive, insane Leatherface, streaked with blood, waving his chainsaw in a frantic arc as his would-be victim speeds away down the highway towards physical safety but miles from anything approaching hope. It’s an escape devoid of triumph, for the predator remains: inscrutable, unbeatable, and, worst of all, waiting.
Who’d have guessed that he was waiting for his close-up? The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning is the second film in three years (after 2003’s offensively bad TCM remake) that attempts to fill in Leatherface’s backstory. Why? The point of Hooper’s roadside butcher was that he was unknowable — the whys and wherefores of his creation, if not irrelevant, are impossible to trace.
In the hands of hack-horror director Jonathan Liebesman, they’re just boring. TCM: The Beginning is essentially just another remake of the original film: pretty city people drive down the wrong stretch of interstate and get turned into hamburger by murderous hillbillies. In short: the art-direction is expensively run down, and there’s lots of imaginatively wrought gore — and it’s never scary or involving in the least.
The script, by Sheldon Turner, labours to bring the Vietnam subtext of the original to the surface — the two male leads here are brothers about to ship overseas — but to no real end: the superficial invocation of war as a precursor to horrors at home is just a way to kill time before kill-time.
The fact that Tobe Hooper has lent his imprimatur to each successive cannibalisation of his work is almost depressing as the realisation that over 30 years on from his participation in a genuinely independent masterpiece, Leatherface has been reduced to grist for the multiplex mill. 
— Adam Nayman