It's a sweet sell, and accurate enough, although reading Wood is typically more thrilling than watching most of the movies he analyzes. (Tobe Hooper's original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, quite obviously the cash cow Craven was looking to milk, may be the exception, remaining a distinctly unsettling and subtextually resonant piece of work.)
In any case, the new, big-budget remake of Craven's film follows the same flow chart and, because it can afford to show us things in mucky detail that the original couldn't, ramps up the savagery several notches. French phlebotomist Alexandre Aja — who earned his power-tool pay grade with High Tension — sets up the bickering vacationing clan (ex-cop dad Ted Levine, starchy mom Kathleen Quinlan, an array of baby-face teens and post-teens) with no particular skill, although in Wood's universe the gun-toting, neo-con flavor of the grownups would suggest a puzzling sensibility for their opposite numbers. Bloodthirsty, torture-happy, predator Democrats?
Actually no: The repressed have returned anew, and the evil desert-dwellers are remaindered out of the atomic dustbin of New Mexico bomb testing, complete with still-standing faux villages peopled by fire-scarred mannequins. By themselves, the images of a posed, plastic America built for annihilation, then waiting motionlessly for the destruction to come, can sometimes be startling, as the 1982 found-footage documentary The Atomic Café made potently clear. And Aja's movie is the first I've seen to use the Bikini Atoll-era ghost-town template as a genre-movie background. But it is, in the end, merely background, a context for more mano-a-mano gore, which is hardly affecting. In fact the only things creepier than the score, which blasts in rhythmic waves like a meltdown alarm, are the credits' glimpses of actual fallout mutations. If Aja wanted to curdle young America's complacent milk for good, he would skip the state-of-the-art flesh wounds and concentrate on what really happened.
In the Seventies, Craven had no money for elaborate makeup, and Berryman needed none; today the laughing, growling Pluto-Jupiter family has distended craniums, Orc teeth, and misaligned eye sockets. (It remains, however, that to get cast as a drooling, disfigured monster in movies like this one must be, for an actor, the most humiliating of insults. And where is Berryman's obligatory remake cameo?) The innocent are tortured and fondled and killed, the limbs and blood fly in ecstatic torrents, but no amount of sheer sadism and ax polls slammed into skulls can surmount the grueling abuse of aimless overacting, whether by Robert Joy's skinny dental-crisis maniac (aren't we past the brainless notion that radiation poisoning imbues one with superhuman strength?) or by "normal" teen Emilie de Ravin, whose reaction to having her family butchered like farm hens is to whine and stamp her feet.
The net effect would be doze-inducing if in fact the Dolby didn't attempt to wake the dead. Still one wonders: Why does Craven's quite craven original film — made for nothing, tasteless as hell, and out for a few bucks — get to be read as a Zeitgeisty signification of subconscious cultural stress, while its go-for-broke remake, even more dedicated to its own mercenary greed and ardor for suffering, does not? Or will a next-generation theorist find signification in Aja's mess, perhaps even a Gallic assault on American conservatism and hubris? Is a cigar sometimes just a cigar, or always a fat dick? Maybe this is good enough: Craven had some newish goofy ideas fueled with a certain degree of subversive relevance; Aja has only Craven's 30-year-old ideas, redressed, rebuffed, and rehydrated with red-dye corn syrup. If it's intended only as a brand-exploiting gross-out ordeal for teenagers, then it's not worth a fart in the wind.
