The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning

Oppressive, mean-spirited and sadistic, The Beginning is an unsavoury exercise in cruelty and pain that one hopes will also be the end.

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?

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning relies on made-you-jump shocks and more fake entrails than a Jaycees haunted house.

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 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...

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.