1939, Texas. An obese woman, employed in a filthy slaughterhouse, gives birth to a deformed child and then throws him into a trash bin. The child is found by Mrs. Hewitt, who takes him home and raises him as a son in her family.
1969, Texas. Brothers Eric and Dean are about to leave for the Vietnam War and decide to take one last road trip with their respective girlfriends Chrissie and Bailey. An attempted robbery by a motorcyclist causes a violent accident to the four young people's vehicle, who, injured and confused, are immediately rescued by Sheriff Hoyt. In reality, the sheriff has no intention of helping the injured, but leads them to his home with the intention of killing them and turning them into food for his entire family…the same family that raised the child abandoned in the trash bin: Leatherface!
In a period when the great myths of the past are being re-proposed for new generations in watered-down versions and re-adapted to modern tastes, it was easy to expect a rewrite of the black man with the chainsaw par excellence: Leatherface. However, all this has already happened three years ago, with the beautiful re-adaptation of Tobe Hooper's masterpiece, “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre”; today we do nothing but deepen the tragic figure of Leatherface, dismember it and build him an increasingly convincing psychology, thus throwing a look at what has been his vital and professional genesis. “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Beginning” thus proposes itself as a prequel to the film made in 2003 by Marcus Nispel and tries to satisfy the most morbid spectator curiosity about the birth of one of the most incisive icons of post-modern horror. To underline, mockingly and ironically, the fate of Leatherface (a butcher of animals and people), the screenwriters Sheldon Turner and David J. Show make the character (known by the name Thomas Hewitt) be born precisely in a filthy slaughterhouse, in a sequence of pain and amniotic disgust that well introduces all the horror that will follow in the course of the film.
Leatherface is born as a misfit, abandoned, still covered in blood, in the trash bin next to the slaughterhouse and spends a childhood and youth marked by mockery and shame for a physical deformation that affects his face, constantly covered by anything that keeps him away from the curious human eye. The closure of the slaughterhouse where he was born and then started working, coincides with the initiation to murder: incited by a family of psychopaths, the boy found his only outlet in mincing the meat of the livestock, but once his low instincts are castrated by the only harmless stress-relieving method, the anger accumulated for years finds an outlet in murder. And here is born the Leatherface boogeyman (once again played by Andrew Bryniarski, the only actor to have played the role of Leatherface for the second time) that the horror movie audience has learned to love, armed with a chainsaw and ready to rip off human faces for the construction of macabre masks.
In this prequel, the cannibal aspect of Leatherface's family is emphasized again, after the theme had been completely neglected in the previous film: the family of sadistic freaks finds themselves literally devouring members of the à-bene society that has not accepted them, justifying the act with the classic warlike reminiscence of “meal for survival necessity”, effectively exposed by an amused and increasingly sadistic Sheriff Hoyt, played once again by the superb R. Lee Ermey (“Full Metal Jacket”). But “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Beginning” is constantly a concentrate of atrocities that do not stop at the mere mention of the family's open cannibalism, but manifest themselves through the complacent sadism of the sheriff, who often pushes the limits of human endurance, and the numerous splatter scenes that have as their protagonist the roaring chainsaw dirty with blood and grease, wielded by Leatherface. Probably with this film we are dealing with the most gory and explicit chapter of the entire saga (which counts to date 6 films), which leaves nothing really to the imagination of the viewer.
Excluding the prologue set in 1939, the story, for the entire first half, follows in parallel the events of the Hewitt family and the adventures of the two pairs of protagonists, thus partly distancing itself from the plot created by Hooper and Henkel in the first film of 1974, to then return to the usual tried-and-true formula in the second half of the film, which also offers us the cult scene of the saga, that is, the dinner scene, in which all members of the cannibal family, the surviving victims and the corpses are gathered at the table.
The negative characters, at this point, are effectively outlined and all enjoy that personality of which they had always suffered from a lack in the “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” saga, characterized by always new families (with the exception of the ever-present Leatherface); even the positive characters, strangely, are sufficiently endowed with personality, thus managing to integrate perfectly into the historical context in which the film is set, that is, rural America of the late 1960s, a period of ideological renewal for young people, but also of great suffering (and shame) for a country that is realizing the physical and moral disaster that is being carried out in Vietnam. Not surprisingly, the two protagonist brothers are diametrically opposed: protective, patriotic and Republican Eric; more eager for freedom and pacifist Dean, who devises an ad hoc desertion with a flight to Mexico.
The only flaw, rather “non-merit”, that can be attributed to “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Beginning” is the lack of a true artistic personality behind the work, which is directed by Jonathan Liebesman (“Darkness Falls” and the short “Rings”, prequel of “The Ring 2”) on the mere imitation of the previous film by Marcus Nispel, with consequent identical rendering of rot and disgust combined with a meticulously desaturated photography by Lukas Ettlin. For the rest it is pure blood entertainment that Leatherface fans cannot fail to appreciate.
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