The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006)

Too many fans seem to be blown away

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

I couldn't remember if I'd seen "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning" before. After watching it, I'm still not sure. It's that kind of movie, but then none of the recent "Chainsaw" retreads have had anything to distinguish one from the other.This one, I guess, is supposed to be a prequel to the classic original, which was made (and set) in 1974. "The Beginning" is set in the '60s, with two characters who are staring down the barrel of an imminent tour of duty in Vietnam.All setting the movie closer to the time of the original "Texas Chainsaw" does it make it look more like garbage by comparison. That movie was made on a shoe-string budget, and yet it was a work of genius with style to spare. It wasn't even that violent, and yet the film's atmosphere was so oppressive that people let their imaginations do the work, and Tobe Hooper spoke of fans coming up to him and describing brutally violent scenes that they swore were in the movie, but in fact, were not.Alas, this prequel, if that's what it is, does nothing to ignite the imagination. It's a tedious, humdrum, dreary affair, which doesn't even really get the violence right. It would have cost millions. Why not go crazy with the gore? Face it: that's the only reason anyone watches this stuff. Why not let them have it? Sure, it has some pretty violent bits toward the end of the movie, but you have to wait so long to see it, and you'll probably be asleep by then.Lee Tergesen, of "Oz" and "Generation Kill" and "Weird Science", has a strange walk on role that is not utilised at all. Knowing what a great actor he is, why did they cast him and give him nothing to do?R. Lee Ermey is really the main antagonist of the film, but I think by 2006 he was really long past his intimidating heyday. He looks like a sad and angry old man, not the demon the movie requires.Leatherface, never really allowed to be the 'star' of these films like Freddy or Jason were the stars of theirs, is predictably pushed into the background, showing up every once in a while when someone needs to die.

Going on a road-trip together, two brothers and their girlfriends going to reenlist in the Army find their stop-off in Texas puts them into contact with the vicious Hewitt family and their chainsaw- wielding son Leatherface and must find a way of getting away alive.This one was a pretty big disappointment, and only has several good things throughout it. One of the biggest positives for this one is that this ups considerably the two factors that had plagued the previous entries in the gore and body count. This one has almost enough deaths than all the previous entries alone, and it generates these through some rather some fun scenes in here. The car chase from the bar and the resulting crash where they get confronted by the family is quite a rather chilling sequence where they get taken away in a creepy manner, while the cutting scenes in the basement are quite stomach-churning there's quite a lot more to like here from the creepiness of the family as they hold the friends hostage. From their torture methods of continually hitting them to continually forcing them to perform arduous tasks in impossible conditions and leaving traps that prevent their escape to their sheer calmness at all of the brutality unleashed and all of their bizarre traditions, they seem weird and creepy which is a great facet that lets the gore really fly in here. The only other thing that works is the final chase through the meat factory which is really great as well, being a really long, brutal and exceptionally gory sequence in a creepy location with an emphasis on suspense and is full of action that soon leads into the great confrontation in the car that ends this in a great manner. These are all that work for the film as this one is a really big disappointment, especially against the first one. The fact that there's very little going is a big one, since it never really does anything interesting for most of the movie with little slashes of interesting scenes here and there, but most of it concerns the group talking or the family making threats against them, and that is a major source of frustration. This is due to them holding them captive for a while and yet there's a long time in between before they start killing with most of that time spent on making threats coupled with pretty mild torture scenes before it leads to killing. There's also the fact that this one also suffers from what the others in the series suffer from, namely the lack of threat from Leatherface as the amount of screen time for Leatherface is quite minimal, making it hard to feel anything but the terror evinced from what he's doing. There's no motive for what's happening and that works even less in building fear for him. That he causes only a couple of deaths is another disappointment, since there's only so much that he can do that at some point it just becomes rudimentary that others would have a higher kill total. That there is the biggest one in lowering the threat of the villain, and also helps to sink the film a lot, as well as its other flaws.Rated R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.

A lowly excuse to make a generic new-school horror movie, and then somehow shoehorn the TCM storyline and Leatherface character into it. They could've substituted Leatherface for some other random new baddie called something like...'Nylon Legs', and no one would've known the difference. This is literally just another torture-porn movie to chuck on the pile with all the others.Filmed in that sepia brown/green/red style that someone somewhere decided was all edgy and deep, the film is typical '20-somethings on road-trip get hijacked by psychos then tortured' fare that gets boring after 15 minutes then drags like a very draggy thing. Absolute cookie cutter nonsense. This is one 'beginning' that'll have you begging for the end right from the start.

This movie was, kind of okay. First of all, it was a little scary, that's why I give it 6/10. The rest was crap. First of all, it had some good cool things, kind of cool seeing the beginning. I thought the rest was a, just a scare fest. Nothing interesting, it's just gory and makes it hard for you to sleep. It was NOT as good as the other movies. The original is WAY better than this. It has no moments in the movie that make you say, "Wow! That was well done!" It is just not as creative as the other movies. I don't recommend it. If you love The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, you might like it. I love The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It is not as good though. It is a poorly thought film. I want everyone here who haven't seen the original, watch the original. You'll love it, but never see this movie first. Thank you.