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Messiah
11-22-2003, 02:47 AM
I just got back from watching it at the cinemas today. I thought it was great. The Leatherface character scares the hell out of me. Most seriel killers in movies, like Jason Voorhees (Friday the 13th) and Michael Myers (Holloween) for example, dont seem to come close to the terror Leatherface creates. I mean in thier movies, when they're stalking someone they walk, never gettting past a jog. Ok its a bit creepy but not as scary as some guy running full pelt at you with a chainsaw!! Now thats terrifying.

I thought the story was very creepy, one of the best in any horror film, well i think. It says its based on a true story but truth be told its nothing like the film.This explanation is taken from another site

The movie is literally based on a man named Ed Gein.

Before serial killing became a fashionable hobby, Ed Gein was doing terrible things to women in Wisconsin in the Fifties. Usually they were dead and he stole their bodies from the grave, but occasionally, when his mother told him, "It's time for you to do the Lord's work," they were alive. By then, his mother was also dead, which made it doubly weird.

It's important also to point out that Gein was the inspiration for Psycho, Deranged and The Silence of the Lambs. Ed adored his mother and she filled his young mind with images of Old Testament damnation and after she died, when he was 39, he became increasingly reclusive and strange. He would flay the flesh of unresurrected corpses and use the skin to make lampshades and chair covers and clothes.

He lived alone in a farmhouse, reading books on the female anatomy, Nazi war crimes and Polynesian head-shrinkers. The place was filled with macabre momentoes and junk. He ate tinned pork-and-beans and human body parts. He would go to the bar in the little town of Plainfield, where the locals made fun of him, and occasionally to a neighbour's house to watch TV and play draughts. His shyness with women was acute.

Living in a rural community during the Eisenhower era, when life was slow and easy with infinite care, he was a man tormented by visions caught between the need to bring the dead back to life, and do his mother's bidding. He is neither vicious, nor intimidating, rather sad and gentle. The madness that drives him belongs in another place.

Ed's mother controlled her children with an iron will. Religious mania clouded her judgement. She would save her boys from the wickedness of the world and destroy sin through the instrument of her second son, as Jehovah did at Sodom and Gomorrah. After her death, when she appears to Ed, she has become a figure of nightmares.

By day, Ed Gein was a quiet man who kept watch over the farm ,but by night, Gein was one of the most bizarre and dangerous psychopaths in recorded history. Raised by a violent alcoholic father and the mother (mentioned above) with an obsessive fear of sin and hatred of sex, Gein had very few friends, and after the death of his parents, Gein was left to his own devices on the family farm (where, under a government subsidy program, he was paid not to grow crops), and his unhealthy obsessions eventually became ugly realities. Gein's crimes included murder, necrophilia, cannibalism, and grave robbing, with Gein using the flesh and bones of his victims to construct household objects, including a suit and mask made from human skin that Gein used when he wanted to dress up as a woman (it's been suggested that some of Gein's crimes stemmed from a twisted attempt to deal with his desire to change his gender). In 1957, two murders committed by Gein attracted the attention of the police, leading to Gein's arrest; near the end of that year, he was declared criminally insane and was committed for life to Wisconsin's Waupan State Hospital, where he stayed until his death in 1984.

As for the chainsaw well Tobe Hooper the director of the original told of how he was shopping in a crowded shoping mall in Austin, he saw a chainsaw in a nearby shop window and thought to himself "Now thats a quick way of getting out of this crowd"
I havent seen the original so i cant compare them. People that i've talked to say the original is better so i dont know. If its anything like the remake then it must be awesome.

Feel free to comment.

Professor Go
11-22-2003, 01:13 PM
Nice review if not a little too much info on Ed Gein - did it have a soundtrack during the movie? From what I remember the original didn't even have a soundtrack which added to the documentary-like feel.

Messiah
11-22-2003, 06:33 PM
Originally posted by Angry Liberal
did it have a soundtrack during the movie? From what I remember the original didn't even have a soundtrack which added to the documentary-like feel.

Nah, i dont think it did, which i think was a good thing for once. I liked the documentry feel it gave off. I liked how they made that mock documentry at the start and finish.

:Spoilers:

At the end where it show the police in the house taping the crime scence walk through, it show leatherface jump out and kill the two officers. The end comentry says something like" the crime scence had'nt been properly secured and to this day Thomas Hewitt (Leatherface, in the original he was called Bubba Sawyer) is still at large, the case is remains open.". When everyone was walking out of the cinema there were heaps of people saying things like "I hope they catch him" and "I bet he's killed agian". I thought it was quite funny that they thought Leatherface face was real. Naturally, i didnt tell them otherwise.:)

Serj
11-23-2003, 04:56 AM
Sounds cool, I'm gonna have to see it soon.
Hopefully it will be better than the original because it now looks dated, in a very funny way.

Professor Go
11-23-2003, 02:12 PM
Dated? How?

Wh|tE gUy
11-23-2003, 09:27 PM
So is this movie a remake or a sequel? I know there was something like 3 in the series prior to this most recent one and from what i heard the original is much different from this one. Didnt the first one start with a group of kids picking up a retarded guy and then he stabbed this guy in a wheel chair?

Messiah
11-24-2003, 03:52 AM
Originally posted by Wh|tE gUy
So is this movie a remake or a sequel? I know there was something like 3 in the series prior to this most recent one and from what i heard the original is much different from this one.

It's supposed to be a remake but alot of people i've talked too said its much different to the original. There are now five in the series, counting the remake.

Originally posted by Wh|tE gUy
Didnt the first one start with a group of kids picking up a retarded guy and then he stabbed this guy in a wheel chair?

At the start of the movie there are five teens in a car that do pick a person, not a retard but a truamatised girl who's tripping out. She dosent stab anyone but she does put a gun in her mouth and BOOM!! blows a hole in her head (complete with all the gore). You should see it.

Serj
11-24-2003, 05:45 AM
Originally posted by Angry Liberal
Dated? How?

I don't know, it just does

Link
11-24-2003, 02:12 PM
I heard it got terrible reviews. The new one, that is.

Wh|tE gUy
11-24-2003, 07:58 PM
actually i heard it get praise for its cinemetography. The scenes i saw seemed pretty stylish

Freak of Kane
12-01-2003, 07:53 AM
I saw it, and thought it was pretty good. Only thing is, these days, films don't get you really scared anymore...unless you're a person who gets easily spooked out, maybe? Well, whatever they did, the makers definitely used a LOT, and a I mean a lot of shock factor to try and make it that much more scary. I could see a lot of people in the cinema jumping in their seats when leatherface suddenly came out or nearly caught the girl...I forgot her name.

Boondock Saint
12-02-2003, 09:50 AM
i love the original, and i love the remake. they're really two different movies (and in my opinion, this is probably actually TCM 5, as most of the other sequels retold/added to the story simultaneously, but YOU try releasing a sequel like that in theaters nowadays). i recommend it. it's an intense time.

Cooolcorey
12-02-2003, 10:52 PM
I didn't really like the movie too much. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't outstanding either.