Sometimes Kalene and I spend so long trying to decide on which movie to watch that we run out of time for actual viewing. To combat this, I sought out several online lists of best/worst movies in different genres.

This comes from from a Rotten Tomatoes list of the best slasher films.

#94: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

• Director: Marcus Nispel
• Starring: Jessica Biel, Jonathan Tucker, Andrew Bryniarski
• Had I seen it before? No, because like a lot of critics, I looked on this movie as unnecessary. Why remake a good movie without updating anything? It just seemed repetitive.
• Should it be on such a list? You know what? I’m okay with it. Yes, it remakes the original without doing something new to justify its existence, but the acting is a lot better than you often see in slasher films. The new death house is creepy, more in an typical-house-of-horrors way than in the original “inbred cannibal hicks with terrible taste in decorating” set design. Like the original, it feels brutal without actually showing all that much gore. The filmmakers miss the subtler (!!) aspects of Leatherface’s masks, but this doesn’t hurt much. Jessica Biel also isn’t required to scream nonstop for half an hour, which cuts down on the teeth-grating tension of the original, but I’m not complaining. One TCM using that many screams is fine. So were the critics right? Is this movie unnecessary? Yep, but it exists anyway, and unless you’re simply offended that anyone would remake the original, this one isn’t a bad watch.

There will be more installments in the future. Join me, won’t you?

In the meantime, buy my books. All the cool kids are doing it.

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