The story begins with five non-descript young people driving through Texas on their way to a concert. The year is 1973, and the beat-up van chugs down an isolated road. Its passengers are Erin (Jessica Biel), her boyfriend Kemper (Eric Balfour), Pepper (Erica Leerhsen, whose other screen credit is Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, which ought to tell you something), Morgan (Jonathan Tucker), and Andy (Mike Vogel). When they find a young woman wandering alongside the road in a daze, they offer to give her a lift. Once in the van, she pulls out a gun and blows her own head off. The group pulls over to a ramshackle country store to call for help. The sheriff agrees to meet them at a nearby factory, where he promises to help.

Sheriff Hoyt (R. Lee Ermey), as you may know, is just one member of a seriously deranged family that proceeds to torture and kill the five-some. The most insidious family member is Leatherface (Andrew Bryniarski), a guy who hacks innocent people with a chainsaw, then sews parts of their flesh together to make a mask for his own deformed face. Most of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre involves Leatherface chasing the young people around and cutting off their limbs. As usual, one character (guess who?) manages to escape at the end.

The problem with remaking a film like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is that you can never really recreate the feel of it. The original came out of nowhere. It was made by people who didn’t work in Hollywood, didn’t have access to a big budget, and didn’t really know what they were doing. This new version – while budgeted at a low-by-Hollywood-standards $17 million – is way to slick and professionally made. Yes, director Marcus Nispel has given the film a dirty, grainy look. But it’s a skillfully done dirty, grainy look. Too many production values get in the way here. Shock-horror movies shouldn’t have sizable budgets and familiar faces in the cast. That’s not scary. Shaky cameras, slightly out-of-focus images, and awkward editing add something to this genre. Lose them, and you also lose that primal sense of dread.

Think about it: would The Blair Witch Project have been as effective had it been made on 35 MM instead of digital video? If it had starred Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze, Jr., and Paul Walker instead of the unknown Heather Donohue, Josh Leonard, and Michael Williams? If it had been budgeted at $20 million instead of $35,000? Shock-horror movies work better when you don’t know what to expect. You don’t know if the director had the budget to toss in a really gruesome special effect, so you sit there waiting anxiously. You don’t know who these actors are, so it’s difficult to say who will live and who will be chopped to bits.

Let me cite another example of how crucial casting can be. R. Lee Ermey is a wonderful actor who has been good in so many movies. He should not have been cast here. He brings a certain amount of baggage with him; we know he is not a homicidal maniac. The part should have gone to an unknown, who could bring a sense of danger to the character. Certainly I understand that actors play roles and many famous actors have done wonderful jobs playing psychos. That’s all well and good; it’s just wrong for this genre, which depends too much on pure shock value. I remember seeing actor Michael Rooker for the first time in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. He was scary because he played the part well, but also because I’d never seen him before. That made him more believable. Could Rooker play the same role today? Yes, but the impact wouldn’t be the same because now we would think of him as an actor and not necessarily as Henry.

Because it has been remade with good production values and a mostly-recognizable cast, this new Texas Chainsaw Massacre didn’t scare me in the least. I confess, though, that I felt my pulse quicken during the scenes with Leatherface. As someone interested in the iconography of horror movies, the image of Leatherface wielding a chainsaw is hard for me to not love. So many slasher movies rely on the killer having a knife or a machete. Something about the chainsaw takes the horror to a higher level within our own minds. It has more menace. Maybe it’s the sound, or perhaps the fact that it’s capable of slicing and dicing someone, not just spearing them. There’s something bottom-line intense about a maniac with a chainsaw that can’t be denied.

What I’m saying is that the movie held my interest, but that’s just a polite way of saying that I wasn’t bored to tears. I don’t think it’s very good, and I certainly don’t recommend it. A film such as this should do more than hold one’s interest. It should frighten, shock, and disturb you. The new Texas Chainsaw Massacre does none of these things. The time and effort spent remaking the original should have been used to do something more original and, hopefully, more effective. Either that, or the makers should have played to the genre’s strengths and gone for the renegade shoestring approach.

( out of four)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is rated R for strong horror violence/gore, language and drug content. The running time is 1 hour and 38 minutes.