Spare Parts: TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and X

And now our most recent cycle of horror reboots comes for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Tobe Hooper’s 1974 genre landmark. The 2022 iteration, called Texas Chainsaw Massacre (drop the article, close the space), ignores all other attempts to continue the original story in order to claim status as a real continuation, like David Gordon Green’s Halloweens. It catches up with Leatherface, the hulking masked brute wielding the murder weapon of the title, who is about to unleash terror once again after decades sitting dormant. You see, instead of youths in a van stumbling into a murderous family’s house in the middle-of-nowhere Texas, there are social media influencers coming to his small dead-end Texas town in hopes of revitalizing it. Easy targets, no? Director David Blue Garcia, from a screenplay in part by Fede Alvarez and collaborators who did the excellently vomitous Evil Dead reboot, uses the premise to stage a predictable slasher picture that never gets out of the shadow of its vastly superior inspiration.

It puts in a slick effort, though. Too slick is more like it. The new cast (like Sarah Yarkin, Elsie Fisher, and Jacob Latimore) is quickly characterized as troubled and idealistic youths. They’re waiting on a bus of tech investors and streaming stars to help them buy up the town, in the process accidentally displacing the unfortunate Leatherface. Eventually they’re joined by returning final girl Sally Hardesty (Olwen Fouere), grey-haired and ready to fight, having evidently taken her lifestyle cues from Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie. (Isn’t it more than a little depressing that such thrilling survivors are constantly shown in these sort of follow-ups to be stuck in place waiting for a sequel well into their elderly years?) Garcia directs the ensemble through a routine number of slaughter sequences, with tons of splatter and viscera, including sloppy disembowelments and spraying decapitations, often carried out with bloody convincing and coldly detailed makeup effects that are certainly a mark of talented craft. But attempts to update its premise are laughable. One guy live-streaming Leatherface declares, “if you do anything, you’re cancelled, bro.” And there may be no more sad commentary on the drop from the original than a final moment riffing on the iconic back-of-the-pickup-truck gasp of cathartic laughing screams that trades it in for a Tesla self-driving into the sunset with its passenger staring helplessly back.

But these filmmakers run into the same problem that all who attempt to follow up the original eventually encounter. Their movies inevitably feel just like movies. Turns out, each new Massacre emphasizes all the more that Hooper’s original isn’t merely a movie, but an unreplicable nightmare. It’s a deceptively crafty work of extreme low-budget ingenuity that resulted in something that plays, to this day, as a work of filmmaking that feels less like a movie, and more dangerously real, with judicious gore, perfectly amateur performances that are plain and raw, and implied terrors so upsetting just outside the frame that the whole picture plays as if its jagged edges threaten to tear loose from the sprocket holes and burn away before our very eyes. Its smallness and its suggestion, combined with its seemingly unaffected naturalism and rough-hewn design, make it so purposely rough and unformed that it truly does feel like anything’s possible. There’s real danger in it. This latest attempt is simply a proficient gore machine, running through the motions, gliding easily down a path the original tore open. It is too neatly packaged to feel truly dangerous.

Far better to find inspiration in the raw materials and do something else. Take X, writer-director Ti West’s return to horror after a decade away. (He’s done lots of television episodes and one Western in the interim.) This effort is a neat genre exercise from an early practitioner of the throwback artisanal horror pictures that are all the rage of late. It’s also a good reminder that West is one of the better filmmakers with knowing how to do long-fuse horror. He takes a simple situation, populates it with a fun cast, and then gives it a few predictably unpredictable variables, drawing it out until, inevitably, the whole thing tips over into inescapable frights. His 2009 House of the Devil finds a babysitter falling into a Satanic plot. His 2011 The Innkeepers has two front desk clerks confronting their hotel’s possible haunting. He trusts his audience to like hanging out with his leads as the films wind their way to the genre’s demands. It’s no different with X, which sends a van of youths into rural Texas in 1979. How Chainsaw Massacre of them. They’re a group of amateur filmmakers planning to rent a guest barracks from a crotchety, ill-tempered elderly farmer and his confused wife. There, unbeknownst to the old couple, the group will shoot what they hope is their ticket to the big time: a pornographic feature called The Farmer’s Daughter. One would see the potential conflict on the horizon right away, even if the movie hadn’t started with a sheriff pulling up to the bloody aftermath of a mass murder on that very property before flashing back 24 hours. We know where this is going.

The film’s conceit locates the intersection between grungy horror and narrative porn, two types of variably disreputable filmmaking bubbling out of the midcentury indie film markets, built on teasing suspense, suggestive editing, and goading audience reactions with sudden explicit reveals. They each, in their eye-popping way, make use of what Berkeley film professor Linda Williams calls “the frenzy of the visible.” They’ve also long had the most, ahem, robust amateur scenes. Especially in the 70s’ regional cinemas (from whence we get Hooper as well as other horror-makers Romero and Craven and Raimi), both genres found purchase in the extremes of mainstream acceptability or just beyond—and, in retrospect, that both had viable theatrical models at the time is almost unbelievable to consider from their current cultural position. Back then, ambitious filmmakers could scrounge up a shoestring budget, and find their rough-hewn howls of creativity speckled with real ingenuity driven by a desire to grab attention. That’s what makes a breeding ground for greedy hucksters and thoughtful artists alike, bound together by exploitation concepts, dubious financing, and corner-cutting illegalities, ultimately becoming the foundation for the boom of American indies in the decades after.

By setting his new movie in the 70s, West sells it partially as a tribute to the entrepreneurial spirt of low-budget moviemaking. The director in the movie (Owen Campbell) says he wants to do more than give the audience what they want, experimenting with the editing “like the French do.” (West obliges, by giving X some stutter-step transitions between scenes and a beautifully ominous split-screen music montage rising action just before things go from bad to worse.) This independent filmmaker brings along his girlfriend (Jenna Ortega) to operate the sound equipment. She didn’t know what kind of movie they’d be making, and is off-put, but also a little surprised how much she likes seeing the performances in front of the camera. The smarmy producer (Martin Henderson) just wants to strike it rich, and make his fiancé (Mia Goth) a sex symbol. The other performers (Brittany Snow and Scott Mescudi) just want to celebrate something they enjoy, and enjoy sharing. West shows us the satisfaction they all take with the creativity, not just the physical act, of their art. They enjoy framing shots and talking ideas for new scenes. They own up with a frankness to their pursuits, and are eager to have their work seen by the masses. After all, they say, why not have fun before they’re too old. “To the perverts!” they toast after their first day of filming, in a sequence of cozy camaraderie that the film’s promised bloodbath drawing closer makes inescapably melancholy.

The back half of X is devoted to the backgrounded creepiness of the old couple escalating to deadly consequences. This results in a series of creatively gross murder sequences, with bodies penetrated by knives and pitchforks and nails and gunfire and…well, I won’t spoil them all. The effects are good gooey gore, with the makeup work on wounds, torn flesh, and fragmented bones cringingly well-done. And the ways West builds suspense and release with jumps and twists—some people die in exactly the way it looks like they will, while others have more sudden or surprising exits—are satisfying in a jolting horror movie style. The more we see of the elderly duo who are resentful of these beautiful young libertines and only grow more so the more they see of them—quite literally—the more it’s clear they’re acting out of deeply repressed or thwarted desires of their own. West pushes a bit too hard on the fright factor of the elderly—I’m not sure wrinkly skin and various dermatological issues are as inherently icky as the movie leans on—but their behavior makes them suitably, pathetically villainous. Everyone has their role. Overall, it’s a horror movie in love with being a horror movie, playing with tropes throughout. There’s evident delight taken in setting up a charismatic cast we hate to see slaughtered and then admire how the filmmaker pulls it off. It may be no less predictable or derivative for it, but the affection shines through every satisfying twist of the plot—and the knife.

Mother & Child: JAMES WHITE and ROOM

In James White and Room, two of 2015’s sharpest, most intimate, and intelligently moving dramas, the stories of a mother and her son take center stage. These are films with rich emotional terrain in claustrophobic settings, relationships trapped in place, with characters hoping for a miraculous way out to better futures. In James White an aimless twenty-something is caring for his mother as she slowly dies of cancer in her New York City apartment. In Room, a kidnapped young woman lives imprisoned in a shed with the 5-year-old she had with her captor and rapist. The films follow two very different dramatic scenarios, traumatic events where the love between mother and child is the only lifeline. The sons are naïve, confused, easily frustrated. The mothers are strong, complicated, and sad. And there are no easy answers.

James White is the feature debut of writer-director Josh Mond, who makes a great first impression with a film of uncommonly blistering emotional honesty. The title character (played by an intense and sorrowful Christopher Abbott) is a painfully relatable rootless man in his late twenties – jobless, single, stuck. He’s a guy theoretically with many options for creating a life for himself, but can’t figure out where best to start, or how to find his break. This could be the start for an Apatow-ian man-child redemption arc, complete with a potential new love interest (Mackenzie Leigh) and a funny friend (Scott Mescudi). But Mond, through a close, expressive camera and sharply perceptive script, excavates arrested adolescent clichés to find deep, overwhelming reservoirs of pain and truth underneath. Here’s a young man who is truly stuck, not only by immaturity, or the obligations of taking care of his ailing mother, but by a helpless feeling as he sees the comfortable future he’d always assumed he’d have slipping away. He can’t see a way forward, so he’s just waiting for life to start.

Cynthia Nixon, as his dying mother, delivers an astonishingly complex portrait of a sickly woman who sees the struggles of her son and wishes she could help, even as she leans on him to get through each day. She knows there’s only so much encouragement she can provide before he needs to find on his own the initiative and lucky breaks that’ll help him move forward. She doesn’t want him using her illness as just another excuse to stay put. Sure, she’s scared of dying, but she’s also worried about leaving her boy to figure out the world on his own. (She’s been separated from his father, who has died shortly before the film begins, an added mournful layer.) Slow-motion grief is displayed in agonizingly precise emotional specificity, as are the frustrations of being young and disconnected from those around you. It’s not every young person who has to watch a parent die. It’s one thing to head out into the so-called real world to start your own life. It’s another thing entirely to have no parents to go back to.

An early scene finds James in a club, alone, listening to his own music through headphones. He’s always separated, distant, suffocating in his sadness and stasis, even when talking to friends and flirts. Selfish, bitter, angry, anxious, and mean, James isn’t always a pleasant figure, but that’s what makes Mond’s film so satisfying an unflinching character study. It’s a film of compassion towards its characters, but never indulges their flaws, understanding them without excusing them. This makes moments of fleeting pure goodness and connection all the more transcendent. In the film’s most moving and devastating scene, James uses his tendency to live in his own interior world to extend an invitation to his mother, using a shared imagined cozy future to provide some comfort. They talk about a time, years from now, when she’ll be the warm grandmother and he’ll be the happy family man. They know it’ll never arrive, but can still take solace in this oasis of hope and connection in a world stretched thin with sadness.

While James White is about a mother slowly fading away, hoping her son finds some way out of his depression, Room concerns itself with a more literal captivity, where hope is for a more literal freedom. And yet it finds in its potential True Crime luridness – screenwriter Emma Donoghue, adapting her own novel, was inspired by similar real life stories – a wisely observed empathy. Steadfastly humane, and gentle in its decidedly non-sensationalistic approach to the nastier moments, the film is attuned to the psychological effects of its scenario on all involved. The mother (Brie Larson) is both victim and protector. The boy (Jacob Tremblay) has never known any different. He thinks Room is the entire world, and everything else is imaginary outer space. When his mother finally decides to tell him the truth, at a level he can understand, it’s a shock. He doesn’t want to believe, but then, slowly, he begins to understand that they need to escape.

The first half of Room is claustrophobic, intensely small. The mother leads her boy through exercises, tries to teach him as best she can, and feeds him with supplies dropped off by the captor on his weekly trips to rape her. (The boy is hidden away in a wardrobe where he can’t see the attacks on his mother.) This is intense subject matter, softened but not diminished by its perspective, narrated by the kid in a precocious and innocent voice. There’s great narrative and emotional clarity, as the film presents its character’s thoughts with ease, Larson and Tremblay doing impressive work communicating interiority with a shift of appearance. The camera is close, always ready to catch faces in motion, in dramatic outbursts and microexpressions alike. And yet the movie never grows visually stale, always finding clear and casual ways to chart their predicament without imprisoning the viewer alongside them.

When it, at last, approaches a pivot point, the film grows richer still, allowing us to see how difficult it would be to go on living with such a massive trauma, such lingering confusion. There’s an entire second half to the story that continues well past where other, lesser, versions of this story would claim victory, then catharsis, then stop. Donoghue keeps going, committing to the concept so fully she wants to see it through, consider its implications from all sides. We go beyond the room. We see other characters. The world opens up, as overwhelming as it is a relief. And there we find the movie’s real power sits not in its skillful conjuring of unimaginable trauma, but in its wise and compassionate understanding of how thoroughly such a scenario would complicate one’s life.

There’s no easy resolution, and the messy emotions it invokes in the characters will take a great deal of time to heal. By allowing us access to the mother’s conflicting and confusing feelings – great love for her child, but great fear and resentment for the situation that led to his creation – that’ll make healing a long, difficult, and in some ways impossible challenge. This is a film that’s smartly concerned with the impact of its ideas. The strong script and tremendous performances make this director Lenny Abrahamson’s best film. He brings it to vivid life by focusing it all on the emotional core, modulating the production design, from expansive smallness of captivity, to exterior wide spaces pressing in, as he creates a convincing world of complicated psychological territory seen through the eyes of a child, and through the lens of connection between mother and son. Love can’t conquer all, but it sure can help.

Car Talk: NEED FOR SPEED

Need for Speed is never better than when it spends time hurtling along in and around cars going top speeds down city streets, country roads, highways, and byways, racing and chasing in reckless and exciting ways. Luckily, those sequences feel like they take up just about the entire movie. It’s a fairly preposterous plot full of posturing archetypes, the kind who can’t handle much of an emotive burden and are never as funny as the movie thinks they are. They’re there only to help create enough of a story to string along scene after scene of cars zooming, providing just enough downtime and modulations of noise to prevent the whole movie from becoming a monotonous squeal of tires. When those cars peal out down the road, with burning rubber and roaring engines, it’s a visceral kick. With a movie like Need for Speed, based on a series of racing video games and advertised as a nonstop chase, what more do you need to see? It’s important not to cheat yourself out of simple movie pleasures such as these.

Director and co-editor Scott Waugh worked for many years as a stunt coordinator and stuntman on all manner of big exciting action sequences in films for the likes of John McTiernan, Michael Bay, and Doug Liman. He knows his way around a car chase, shooting them at top speeds with crisp, smeary digital photography that catches a motion blur off the gleaming paint as the sound design works with a bass kick of gears shifting and tires sliding. The star of the movie is a modified Ford Mustang. Waugh is always sure to let the camera linger on car logos, giving each new vehicle entrances that are usually reserved for starlets and special guest stars. The Mustang is tricked out to go fast; its top speed is somewhere just north of 230 miles per hour. A financially struggling mechanic (Aaron Paul) does the job for a snobby and insecure professional racecar driver (Dominic Cooper). They may be the humans that make the cars move, but their interpersonal struggles are sublimated at every turn into the action of the vehicles through the aggression of their driving.

And Paul certainly has reasons to be angry with Cooper, who cheats him out of millions of dollars, causes a drag racing accident that kills a close friend, and then flees the scene leaving him to take the blame. After a couple years in prison on manslaughter charges, Paul is ready for some macho car culture vengeance. He wants to reclaim his good name and expose Cooper as the smug villain he is. Paul is so good at playing the good-hearted criminal in over his head and paying for it through palpable emotional pain. He did it for five seasons on Breaking Bad, after all. Need for Speed calls on him to play a similar emotional range, but lighter, pulpier. He’s surrounded by a gang of smiling gearheads (Rami Malek, Scott Mescudi, Ramon Rodriguez) eager to help him, and a pretty car-loving girl (Imogen Poots) willing to ride shotgun. The plan is to zoom from New York to California in 45 hours, getting the attention of a webcasting drag race tycoon (Michael Keaton) along the way so he’ll give them an invitation to his infamous race and meet the enemy behind the wheel once more.

Does that make a whole lot of sense? I’m not so sure. But the screenplay by George and John Gatins uses it as an excuse to send the Mustang flying down the highway at over 100 miles an hour most of the way. Every few states, there’s a new obstacle. They appear with all the regularity of video game villains. In Detroit, there are cops who pursue them. In Nebraska, a state trooper spots them. In Utah, there are greedy bounty hunters. In California, there are other racers, still more cops, and, of course, Dominic Cooper, who would be twirling his mustache if only he had one. Most of the action takes place in broad daylight, the better to appreciate the impressive stunt work on display. The camera sits on the side of the road, hangs off of cars, flings forward into crashes, and stands back to take in spinning debris. It’s clearly and energetically cut together, ready to show off its best assets.

Waugh has grown as a filmmaker since his debut film, the military actioner Act of Valor, showed a glimmer of promise buried under a self-serious plot, stiff tone, and muddy action. Need for Speed takes itself the right amount of serious, which is to say not enough to be a drag. Waugh lets the scenes between the action get carried along by fine actors in thin parts before plunging back into the well-choreographed excitement of cars going very fast. He knows exactly what kind of movie it is, a throwback to films like H.B. Halicki’s Gone in 60 Seconds and Hal Needham’s Smokey and the Bandit, B-movies directed by stuntmen who reveled in sending real cars careening down real roadways. It’s a movie where the hero gets right up in the face of the villain (so close, watching with the sound down might make you think they’re about to make out) and threatens to prove who is the better man by winning the big race. It’s a movie that is bookended by a symbol (first abstract, later literal) of a lighthouse standing erect at the beachside finish line, to really hammer home the masculinity at stake. It’s a movie where inarticulate characters feel big emotions, anger, love, joy, and express them all by driving as fast as they can.