THE DUKE ON
TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE 2003
TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE 2003
In case you didn’t notice, what’s happening in the coke-sick
corridors of Filmic Affairs in the recent times, is that two
bandwagons are trundling along, one banging into the other now
and again in highly entertaining scenes reminiscent of Ben Hur or
maybe Days Of Thunder. At first glance, a fella could be
hoodwinked into assuming both these bandwagons to be one and the
same. Maybe one of them’s just a reflection in a mirror or some
such.
(In case you were wondering, mirrors are what folks used to use
for to make folks disappear and reappear as if by “magic” in the
feature flicks, before CGI was invented and nobody ever needed
use a mirror ever again.)
Anyhow, Bandwagon 1 involves the remaking of the feature flicks.
The folks in this bandwagon, the band perhaps, they like to yack
day and night about you know what would be the coolest, if we
could maybe make a film exactly the fuck the same as From Beyond,
with the same characters and situations, except it’s nowadays,
and therefore all the more amazing.
The other bandwagon, which, to avoid confusion, we’ll call
Bandwagon 3, it deals with the remakes of the classic feature
flicks too, except the folks inside, in-between sippin the
moonshine and playing the banjo, they like to yack about what the
fuck you mean Dawn Of The Dead 2004 is better than Dawn Of The
Dead 1978? Are you insane in the guts, they’ll ask? Are you out
of your face on the crack-browns? Also, these folks don’t like
you to mention John Carpenter’s The Thing or David Cronenberg’s
The Fly. They’d rather you didn’t mention that sorta shit around
them, if it’s all the same to you.
As far as The Duke goes, I’d say I’m somewhere in the middle of
these two duelling parties. For sure, I’m gonna be gettin’
sanctimonious as all roaring Moses when somebody wants to tell me
The Ring is preferable to Ringu, but at the same time, ain’t no
big deal if Sam Raimi thinks what the world needs is a version of
Ju-On with more Caucasians.
Lest we forget, Sam Raimi is responsible for one of Kirsten
Dunst's most breath-taking cinematic outings, and so he’s
entitled to do whatever the fuck he wants, pretty much.
So, with this in mind, let The Duke be the first to step up on
top of some smaller, less masculine Dukes of some kind, and
holler across the motherfucking globe that cheer the hell up,
man, it’s ok to like Dawn Of The Dead 2004. Ain’t a damn thing
wrong with that. I kinda liked it myself. No, it wasn’t as good
as Dawn Of The Dead 1978, but it was better than, say, Navy Seals
1990. Our favourite flicks ain’t gonna disappear just cause some
new version gets flung out there. It’s not like George Lucas had
anything to do with Ringu. Just chill out, man.
I bet you even nodded your head during some of those Beatles
covers in I Am Sam. I bet you tapped your foot like hell when The
Black Crowes sang about Lucy Is in The Sky And Diamonds or
whatever. You were probably pissed that they didn’t do
Satisfaction or The Mighty Quinn or some other Beatle hits. What
would’ve made I Am Sam better, you said later on when you typed
up a review for an internet page, is if somebody had done Sgt
Perrier.
Ain’t no difference, is what The Duke would venture, between Ryan
Adams doing Wonderwall and Chuck Russell doing The Blob.
So the other day I bought this new-fangled Texas Chain Saw
Massacre on DVD. The reason, truth be told, is that it was a 3
for 1 deal in the DVD emporium, and I had intended to purchase
Mona Lisa Smile and also Get Over It, and so fuck it, I’m
thinking, I might as well pick up this here too.
What the hell else was I gonna do? Buy another copy of Hana Bi?
That’d be insane, man, fucking insane. I’m surprised someone like
you even thought of it, to be honest.
I’d already seen TCSM 2003, back in the day, and I remembered the
fella from Full Metal Jacket who wasn’t Joker or Stanley Kubrick
was very good. Also, there was a bit were the camera sails
through a bullet-wound in a lass’s skull. If I gotta sum up the
factors in my choice of purchase, those two things there would be
high on the list. Probably numbers 2 and 7, respectively.
Now, I ain’t under any delusions here. There ain’t no way in
hell's holy acres that Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2003 is as good
as Texas Chain Saw Massacre 1974. In fact, if you were under the
impression that it might be, then you deserve the resultant
disappointment, angst, depression, subsequent visits to treatment
facilities of varying degrees of usefulness.
Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2003 isn’t even as good as Texas Chain
Saw Massacre 2 1986. It comes close, though, to Texas Chain Saw
Massacre 3 1990.
It doesn’t have the satire of the original. It doesn’t have the
sexual politics of the sequel. It’s not as intelligent as either.
Here’s some shit it does have, though;
For one, it looks beautiful. This Marcus Nispel motherfucker is
one of these advert directors that made it into Hollywood, but if
you’re gonna hold that against someone then it’s high time you
forgot all about David Fincher and Ridley Scott and even Tony
Kaye, the lovable rogue behind such works as American History X
and American History X. You may have seen his most successful
work, American History X.
Also, Nispel was kicked off of End Of Days on account of his ego.
Fucking hell, Nispel, they probably thought. Arnie’s trying to
save the world from Satan and also get over some personal trauma
of some sort, and you’re throwing hissy fits cause we forgot to
chill your milk in Disney’s frozen guts?
You’re this close Nispel.
So yeah, TCSM 2003 looks stunning, partly because Nispel just
loves sweaty people. You may remember the hilariously fucking
awful A Time To Kill, and you may remember thinking something
along the lines of “I wonder how Joel Schumacher got these people
so sweaty? Look at them, they look they could slide up and down
the street all damn day. I’m betting that Matthew McConaughey
stinks like a motherfucker.”
TCSM 2003 doesn’t have Matthew McConaughey, unlike Texas Chain
Saw Massacre – A New Generation, which was also a remake of
sorts, and which did have him.
What TCSM 2003 does have, though, is a fella who kinda looks a
bit like Matthew McConaughey.
Also, TCSM 2003 is never happier than when ripping a limb or two
off of some unfortunate teenager of some kind. Tobe Hooper’s
original had not one gore scene. Nispel, however, makes sure that
for every five minutes of screentime there’s at least 27 shots of
a torn leg, or brains on a back seat, or pigs heads, or folks
getting shoved onto meat hooks in close-up.
Of course, Hooper made up for the lack of all that in TCSM 1974
when it came time to fling TCSM 2 together, with guts flying left
and right.
What a fucking great picture that was.
There are loads of things TCSM 2003 does right, and most of them
involve looking great. Sadly, there are also loads of things they
fuck up, and how about I just lay those sons a bitches out right
now;
There just ain’t no sense of family in here. Texas Chain Saw
Massacre was at least 67% as brilliant as it was purely because
of how wickedly funny the family scenes were. Tobe Hooper took
the idea of the All-American Nuclear Family and fucked it right
upside the chops, just as Hitchcock had done a decade and a half
earlier when Norman Bates started getting all obsessed with his
father or whatever that film was about.
Both flicks were based, in part, on Ed Gein, so maybe the trick
is to make sure you base your film on that, if you want to dig
deep and get the satire just right. TCSM 2003, though, it tells
Gein to go fuck himself, and decides to pretend that TCSM 1974
was a “true story” like Ray or Critters 2.
Maybe it all boils down to the fact that back in the medieval
climes of 1974, the American Family was still considered
something scared and so on. Single parents were fit only for
prestige pictures like Scorsese’s Alice Done Went On The Road
With Kris Kristofferson. There was a point to Hooper’s lambasting
of such. Here, what point would Nispel be making, now that family
means less than Santa’s stinky asshole?
So yeah, in TCSM 2003, you never get a sense that these folks are
all related, even though Nispel goes out of his way to show how
inbred-looking these people are.
Which is another thing that disturbs a fella about not just TCSM,
but all those Demented Hillbillies flicks from Deliverance to
Fahrenheit 9/11. They get very, very close to cultural snobbery.
What we’re being asked to accept is that certain areas are filled
with folks who are just “wrong”. Can you imagine a film about
some well-to-do youngsters travel into South Central and get
picked off one by one by demented “blacks”. You’d shit yourself.
Here, though, it’s somehow OK, like a certain demographic, on
account of their poverty, have earned the right to be portrayed
as monsters and necrophiliacs and lawyers. It’s not like they’re
gonna see the damn thing. They don't show horror movies on CB
Radio.
I don’t know that that rests too well with The Duke. But I’ll let
it slide this time, Nispel, Hooper, Boorman, Moore et al.
In order that we don’t go ahead and assume TCSM 2003 to be a
hollow, vacuous, shallow slab of looking good and saying fuck
all, Nispel and the admirably respectful screenwriter Scott Kosar
fling at least one genuinely unforgettable moment into the mix.
What it involves is the fella from Full Metal Jacket demanding
that a young fella show him how another character killed
themselves. It constantly brings to mind that wretched moment in
Bad Lieutenant when Harvey Keitel cleans his pipes whilst two
young girls tell him how they administer oral blow-jobs.
“Show Harvey how you suck a dick.”
Thankfully the fella from Full Metal Jacket doesn’t prance around
naked in a deranged crack-dream of some kind.
The scene is a sadistic delight, is what, high to the nuts on the
possibilities afforded by a complete disregard for the comfort of
ones audience.
However the hell, what it ends up as is a glossy studio variation
on a timeless, unforgettable shock to the fuck me’s. TCSM 1974
was, however painful it may be to admit, a glorious accident as
much as anything. As fitting for a film so concerned with solar
movements and all that malarkey, the stars just aligned, man,
just hit the right spot at the right time. Thank fuck they didn’t
wait a week, or maybe the sky would’ve shifted once more, and
we'd have ended up with, well, something along the lines of TCSM
2003. An enjoyable flick, one that’s gleefully unpleasant for
sure, but hardly the riot of soul-shaking intensity Hooper and
company conjured back in the day.
What it amounts to, is hearing maybe The Offspring doing a cover
of Kick Out The Jams. For sure, there’s probably gonna be a few
more “motherfuckers” in there, but they won’t add anything to the
perfectly spat variant in the original. It’s probably gonna be
faithful, you’re gonna be aware that The Offspring dig the hell
outta those MC5’s, but the time’s gone, and what it is, is on the
one hand a nostalgic exercise, and on the other hand a perfect
example for to bring up in conversations about if you wanna be
faithful to that feeling, then probably best to write a new
fucking song.
Thanks folks.
Drop The Duke A Line Via Electronical Email
corridors of Filmic Affairs in the recent times, is that two
bandwagons are trundling along, one banging into the other now
and again in highly entertaining scenes reminiscent of Ben Hur or
maybe Days Of Thunder. At first glance, a fella could be
hoodwinked into assuming both these bandwagons to be one and the
same. Maybe one of them’s just a reflection in a mirror or some
such.
(In case you were wondering, mirrors are what folks used to use
for to make folks disappear and reappear as if by “magic” in the
feature flicks, before CGI was invented and nobody ever needed
use a mirror ever again.)
Anyhow, Bandwagon 1 involves the remaking of the feature flicks.
The folks in this bandwagon, the band perhaps, they like to yack
day and night about you know what would be the coolest, if we
could maybe make a film exactly the fuck the same as From Beyond,
with the same characters and situations, except it’s nowadays,
and therefore all the more amazing.
The other bandwagon, which, to avoid confusion, we’ll call
Bandwagon 3, it deals with the remakes of the classic feature
flicks too, except the folks inside, in-between sippin the
moonshine and playing the banjo, they like to yack about what the
fuck you mean Dawn Of The Dead 2004 is better than Dawn Of The
Dead 1978? Are you insane in the guts, they’ll ask? Are you out
of your face on the crack-browns? Also, these folks don’t like
you to mention John Carpenter’s The Thing or David Cronenberg’s
The Fly. They’d rather you didn’t mention that sorta shit around
them, if it’s all the same to you.
As far as The Duke goes, I’d say I’m somewhere in the middle of
these two duelling parties. For sure, I’m gonna be gettin’
sanctimonious as all roaring Moses when somebody wants to tell me
The Ring is preferable to Ringu, but at the same time, ain’t no
big deal if Sam Raimi thinks what the world needs is a version of
Ju-On with more Caucasians.
Lest we forget, Sam Raimi is responsible for one of Kirsten
Dunst's most breath-taking cinematic outings, and so he’s
entitled to do whatever the fuck he wants, pretty much.
So, with this in mind, let The Duke be the first to step up on
top of some smaller, less masculine Dukes of some kind, and
holler across the motherfucking globe that cheer the hell up,
man, it’s ok to like Dawn Of The Dead 2004. Ain’t a damn thing
wrong with that. I kinda liked it myself. No, it wasn’t as good
as Dawn Of The Dead 1978, but it was better than, say, Navy Seals
1990. Our favourite flicks ain’t gonna disappear just cause some
new version gets flung out there. It’s not like George Lucas had
anything to do with Ringu. Just chill out, man.
I bet you even nodded your head during some of those Beatles
covers in I Am Sam. I bet you tapped your foot like hell when The
Black Crowes sang about Lucy Is in The Sky And Diamonds or
whatever. You were probably pissed that they didn’t do
Satisfaction or The Mighty Quinn or some other Beatle hits. What
would’ve made I Am Sam better, you said later on when you typed
up a review for an internet page, is if somebody had done Sgt
Perrier.
Ain’t no difference, is what The Duke would venture, between Ryan
Adams doing Wonderwall and Chuck Russell doing The Blob.
So the other day I bought this new-fangled Texas Chain Saw
Massacre on DVD. The reason, truth be told, is that it was a 3
for 1 deal in the DVD emporium, and I had intended to purchase
Mona Lisa Smile and also Get Over It, and so fuck it, I’m
thinking, I might as well pick up this here too.
What the hell else was I gonna do? Buy another copy of Hana Bi?
That’d be insane, man, fucking insane. I’m surprised someone like
you even thought of it, to be honest.
I’d already seen TCSM 2003, back in the day, and I remembered the
fella from Full Metal Jacket who wasn’t Joker or Stanley Kubrick
was very good. Also, there was a bit were the camera sails
through a bullet-wound in a lass’s skull. If I gotta sum up the
factors in my choice of purchase, those two things there would be
high on the list. Probably numbers 2 and 7, respectively.
Now, I ain’t under any delusions here. There ain’t no way in
hell's holy acres that Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2003 is as good
as Texas Chain Saw Massacre 1974. In fact, if you were under the
impression that it might be, then you deserve the resultant
disappointment, angst, depression, subsequent visits to treatment
facilities of varying degrees of usefulness.
Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2003 isn’t even as good as Texas Chain
Saw Massacre 2 1986. It comes close, though, to Texas Chain Saw
Massacre 3 1990.
It doesn’t have the satire of the original. It doesn’t have the
sexual politics of the sequel. It’s not as intelligent as either.
Here’s some shit it does have, though;
For one, it looks beautiful. This Marcus Nispel motherfucker is
one of these advert directors that made it into Hollywood, but if
you’re gonna hold that against someone then it’s high time you
forgot all about David Fincher and Ridley Scott and even Tony
Kaye, the lovable rogue behind such works as American History X
and American History X. You may have seen his most successful
work, American History X.
Also, Nispel was kicked off of End Of Days on account of his ego.
Fucking hell, Nispel, they probably thought. Arnie’s trying to
save the world from Satan and also get over some personal trauma
of some sort, and you’re throwing hissy fits cause we forgot to
chill your milk in Disney’s frozen guts?
You’re this close Nispel.
So yeah, TCSM 2003 looks stunning, partly because Nispel just
loves sweaty people. You may remember the hilariously fucking
awful A Time To Kill, and you may remember thinking something
along the lines of “I wonder how Joel Schumacher got these people
so sweaty? Look at them, they look they could slide up and down
the street all damn day. I’m betting that Matthew McConaughey
stinks like a motherfucker.”
TCSM 2003 doesn’t have Matthew McConaughey, unlike Texas Chain
Saw Massacre – A New Generation, which was also a remake of
sorts, and which did have him.
What TCSM 2003 does have, though, is a fella who kinda looks a
bit like Matthew McConaughey.
Also, TCSM 2003 is never happier than when ripping a limb or two
off of some unfortunate teenager of some kind. Tobe Hooper’s
original had not one gore scene. Nispel, however, makes sure that
for every five minutes of screentime there’s at least 27 shots of
a torn leg, or brains on a back seat, or pigs heads, or folks
getting shoved onto meat hooks in close-up.
Of course, Hooper made up for the lack of all that in TCSM 1974
when it came time to fling TCSM 2 together, with guts flying left
and right.
What a fucking great picture that was.
There are loads of things TCSM 2003 does right, and most of them
involve looking great. Sadly, there are also loads of things they
fuck up, and how about I just lay those sons a bitches out right
now;
There just ain’t no sense of family in here. Texas Chain Saw
Massacre was at least 67% as brilliant as it was purely because
of how wickedly funny the family scenes were. Tobe Hooper took
the idea of the All-American Nuclear Family and fucked it right
upside the chops, just as Hitchcock had done a decade and a half
earlier when Norman Bates started getting all obsessed with his
father or whatever that film was about.
Both flicks were based, in part, on Ed Gein, so maybe the trick
is to make sure you base your film on that, if you want to dig
deep and get the satire just right. TCSM 2003, though, it tells
Gein to go fuck himself, and decides to pretend that TCSM 1974
was a “true story” like Ray or Critters 2.
Maybe it all boils down to the fact that back in the medieval
climes of 1974, the American Family was still considered
something scared and so on. Single parents were fit only for
prestige pictures like Scorsese’s Alice Done Went On The Road
With Kris Kristofferson. There was a point to Hooper’s lambasting
of such. Here, what point would Nispel be making, now that family
means less than Santa’s stinky asshole?
So yeah, in TCSM 2003, you never get a sense that these folks are
all related, even though Nispel goes out of his way to show how
inbred-looking these people are.
Which is another thing that disturbs a fella about not just TCSM,
but all those Demented Hillbillies flicks from Deliverance to
Fahrenheit 9/11. They get very, very close to cultural snobbery.
What we’re being asked to accept is that certain areas are filled
with folks who are just “wrong”. Can you imagine a film about
some well-to-do youngsters travel into South Central and get
picked off one by one by demented “blacks”. You’d shit yourself.
Here, though, it’s somehow OK, like a certain demographic, on
account of their poverty, have earned the right to be portrayed
as monsters and necrophiliacs and lawyers. It’s not like they’re
gonna see the damn thing. They don't show horror movies on CB
Radio.
I don’t know that that rests too well with The Duke. But I’ll let
it slide this time, Nispel, Hooper, Boorman, Moore et al.
In order that we don’t go ahead and assume TCSM 2003 to be a
hollow, vacuous, shallow slab of looking good and saying fuck
all, Nispel and the admirably respectful screenwriter Scott Kosar
fling at least one genuinely unforgettable moment into the mix.
What it involves is the fella from Full Metal Jacket demanding
that a young fella show him how another character killed
themselves. It constantly brings to mind that wretched moment in
Bad Lieutenant when Harvey Keitel cleans his pipes whilst two
young girls tell him how they administer oral blow-jobs.
“Show Harvey how you suck a dick.”
Thankfully the fella from Full Metal Jacket doesn’t prance around
naked in a deranged crack-dream of some kind.
The scene is a sadistic delight, is what, high to the nuts on the
possibilities afforded by a complete disregard for the comfort of
ones audience.
However the hell, what it ends up as is a glossy studio variation
on a timeless, unforgettable shock to the fuck me’s. TCSM 1974
was, however painful it may be to admit, a glorious accident as
much as anything. As fitting for a film so concerned with solar
movements and all that malarkey, the stars just aligned, man,
just hit the right spot at the right time. Thank fuck they didn’t
wait a week, or maybe the sky would’ve shifted once more, and
we'd have ended up with, well, something along the lines of TCSM
2003. An enjoyable flick, one that’s gleefully unpleasant for
sure, but hardly the riot of soul-shaking intensity Hooper and
company conjured back in the day.
What it amounts to, is hearing maybe The Offspring doing a cover
of Kick Out The Jams. For sure, there’s probably gonna be a few
more “motherfuckers” in there, but they won’t add anything to the
perfectly spat variant in the original. It’s probably gonna be
faithful, you’re gonna be aware that The Offspring dig the hell
outta those MC5’s, but the time’s gone, and what it is, is on the
one hand a nostalgic exercise, and on the other hand a perfect
example for to bring up in conversations about if you wanna be
faithful to that feeling, then probably best to write a new
fucking song.
Thanks folks.
Drop The Duke A Line Via Electronical Email
