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BY TOM MEEK
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There are movies that defy remaking. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is one (so much for Gus Van Sant’s needless update), and you’d think that Tobe Hooper’s chilling 1974 freak show based on true events would be another. Yet director Marcus Nispel, whose credits are largely Janet Jackson videos, dusts off the basic elements and comes up with something surprisingly affecting. It won’t stick in the pit of your stomach the way the original did, but it does offer some hair-raising turns. That’s largely thanks to the foreboding ambiance Nispel creates, but the key is the heroine-in-peril performance by buxom babe Jessica Biel. Sure her Erin is shoehorned into her jeans and tiny tank, but when the chainsaw-wielding psychopath, Leatherface, starts to hack through her friends, she summons a degree of "I won’t lie down and die" moxie reminiscent of a young Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. It helps that Erin and her van mates, after they get detoured to the defunct meatpacking factory inhabited by Leatherface and his brood of redneck miscreants, don’t fall into the stupid victim-in-waiting routine. Apart from the Blair Witch–style faux documentary footage that bookends the film and the trite Hollywood ending, this Texas Chainsaw Massacre achieves its slight, gory goals.
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