Synopsis
Chrissie and her friends set out on a road trip for a final fling before one is shipped off to Vietnam. Along the way, bikers harass the foursome and cause an accident that throws Chrissie from the vehicle. The lawman who arrives on the scene kills one of the bikers and brings Chrissie's friends to the Hewitt homestead, where young Leatherface is learning the tools of terror.
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Cast
- Jordana BrewsterChrissie
- Taylor HandleyDean
- Diora BairdBailey
- Matt BomerEric
- R. Lee ErmeyUncle Charlie Hewitt / Sheriff Hoyt
- Lew TempleSheriff Winston Hoyt
- Andrew BryniarskiThomas Hewitt / Leatherface
- Tim DeZarnSlaughterhouse Supervisor
- Lee TergesenHolden
- Cyia BattenAlex
Recommendations
- 50
The Hollywood Reporter
The whole fear-of-obese-hillbillies device is starting to smell as stale as Leatherface's playroom. Does this horror trend simply reflect a national fear, as giant radioactive ants personified the Bomb in the 1950s? If so, maybe it's time for us all to go on a diet; America needs fresh fodder for its boogeymen. - 50
L.A. Weekly
Few surprises lie in store for connoisseurs of torture cinema, though unlike its 2003 predecessor, this Massacre owes less to Bay’s attention-deficient aesthetics than to the measured, Georgia O’Keefe-on-acid sensibility that guided Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel’s much-cannibalized original. - 50
The New York Times
Mindlessly repeats the archetypal "Chainsaw" scenario. - 50
Film Threat
"The Beginning" is a better movie than the 2003 remake, even if the plot is understandably similar. There are only so many ways hapless teens can get brutally slaughtered, after all, but Liebesman and company keep things appropriately creepy, right down to aping the look of the 1974 original. - 38
New York Daily News
Just another trip down a very dusty road. - 38
New York Post
Misses everything that made the first one eat into your spine like meningitis. - 38
TV Guide Magazine
Who will survive and what will be left of them? If you don't have a pretty good idea, this is not the movie for you. If you do, rest assured you've seen it all before. - 30
Variety
Liebesman hews close to the 2003 pic’s bile-tinged snuff-film aesthetic. His approach falls somewhere between the overwrought sadism of the “Saw” series and the giddy gore-for-gore’s-sake energy of “The Devil’s Rejects,” sharing those films’ twisted notion that today’s auds are willing to embrace such homicidal maniacs as heroes.
