1st Images from that Michael Bay produced TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE adaptation online!

I was EXTREMELY HOSTILE as a person visiting this set. The first film that I ever had any association at all with was TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE -- As a small tot - about the same age as my lil nephew Kublakhan - folks burst into my birthday party from the set of TCM. I have burned into my memory for all time Gunnar Hansen roaring that chainsaw in full Leatherface look... into the living room of my house and giving me a hand from the set of TCM. The entire cast was at this party and the air was very pungent with the smell of cannabis and karo syrup. It was an idyllic childhood memory.

I currently own the 'arm chair' that was used in the original dining room scene that Marilyn Burns was tied down to in that absolutely horrific intense cinematically genius scene. I love everything about the original film and at the foot of my bed is a yellow and orange Playschool pullstring vibrating chainsaw that was given to me at that birthday party of mine... so many years ago... to cut my birthday cake (which had Godzilla eating my father on it). Then in the past few years I've become pretty friendly with Tobe Hooper. Over years of selling movie posters I'm very very friendly with Ed Neal (the hitchhiker), who happens to be one of the world's premiere movie poster dealers.

As a Chainsaw Fan - I've been perpetually disappointed with every single sequel to the series... none more than that excruciating piece of shit that starred Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger. Whew...

I went to the set to be an undercover mole to expose and rip and shred and literally destroy any and all chance this movie had to make a name for itself. I went sort of rubbing my hands together knowing full well that I would write up the most scathing piece of vitrol the world had ever seen. I was going to put to shame my review of that bloody festering dung lice of a 30th Anniversary Special Edition of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD DVD!!! I was going to play it cool... curry favor - get my hands on the script to TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and then kill.

I went to the set... an absolutely wonderfully atmospheric set that they didn't make - they just found it. It was creepy and scary and freaky in a very real - non-HOLLYWOOD-ed way. Humph... production design... location scouting... So... it'll be a nice looking log of shit. I talked with the producers for hours - I smiled and listened to them tell me all sorts of happy stuff about the film, how great everything is... how wonderful it all was... Then I broke free of them for a bit - and talked to various crew members that I've known from about a dozen other movies shot in Austin and they told me that they were having a miserable time shooting this thing. Many of them didn't care for the director Marcus Nispel. Well - we all remember the Marcus Nispel stories that came from the pre-production of END OF DAYS - where his ego trip was legendary.

Upon meeting Marcus Nispel he was in... charm mode... so I didn't see any of the alleged egomaniacal side of him, so I can't confirm if that's there... or if it's closer to a James Cameron-y perfectionism type of thing. However, in talking with him... I did learn a great deal of what HE was thinking coming into the film... I asked him.. what he thought of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and its sequels...

He loves the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre... He said that essentially to him, it is the closest thing to a SNUFF film that most people have ever seen. The actors are all people that we've never seen before or since in film really. That the tone of the film is that this is really happening. The production design wasn't so much of a Hollywood look as much as it was an echo of memories of seriel killers' homes we've seen in pictures. The whole film felt authentic. Then he said that the next film which essentially was all about the gore and grisley nature of things... and that wasn't what the original was about. The terror was removed. He felt that in the third film that they began to emphasize a more comedic side of things and that took them even further from the original. And in the last one - they took the worst aspects of the 2 sequels and made them bigger and added actors that didn't belong.

Now personally... this sort of set me back... because this allegedly crazy german egotist had just nailed my thoughts exactly on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series to this date. So I asked him... What was he making then?

He told me that when he was thinking of a first film to do, he wanted something small, but everything that he was being offered was a big sort of production, but when he read the script for this film, and saw some of the location scouting that had been done on the project - he realized that this was something he could do and make as good as he could. He contacted his longtime Director of Photography, Daniel Pearl about shooting the film with him... They'd been making and shooting Music Videos and Commercials for years together all over the world... and he found out that Daniel had been the original Director of Photography on the original and he told him that they were going to shoot a snuff film again. That this movie had to be real. That the acting had to feel not like acting but like these characters were experiencing each of these things as they happened. With that same sense of IT IS HAPPENING that the original had.

At this point... I realized that I needed to know more about this film, because there was a chance that they were doing this right. I talked with Daniel Pearl and he seemed up beat on the film quite a bit and told me tons of stories from the original - in terms of happy accidents that happened from beginning to end on that project.

After I went home... about a week later they sent me the script - and I read it. Now - the script is the best CHAINSAW script I've read that has come after the original. Frankly - and honestly - that's not really saying much as the Chainsaw sequels had varying degrees of suckage. However, you have to understand that unlike the other three sequels this movie is set in the same period as the original. It isn't a remake - because it doesn't involve any of the original teenager characters... they aren't there to visit a family's grave, they don't have a family home in the area... they are not running out of gas. The initial hook for how they get caught up in all of this... well, frankly... it's very very good, and if they can keep it secret - it'll be one helluva audience moment in the theater...

The 'Family' is structured a bit differently - there isn't a hitchhiker perse, there isn't a 'cook' perse... there is a gas station / meat market... There is the old country home and there is a Leatherface and a 'family'. And of course there's a chainsaw. Michael Bay's early quotes about this being less gory than the original... well frankly... he was talking a bit out his own ass... In the two days I was on set I saw more violence and gore than in the original - but it isn't a gore film - and neither was the original. The focus is on the characters - and they're decent teenage characters - the key is going to be... Are they horrified, do we believe it and how REAL will it all feel.

The standout from visiting the set and interviewing folks was R LEE ERMY - who plays the character that... in the first film would most be like 'The Cook'. R. Lee was a hoot - spilling spoiler after spoiler... of which I'll only pass along one. In one scene he apparently improved and shoved the barrel of his gun down one of those pretty boys you see in a picture on that link, who then vomited all over R. Lee's hand and gun! Ermy told me that he was taking his character to the extreme... that's the type he is. He's always been verbally abusive in film, but here... here he wanted to be the embodiment of every angle of abuse, be it physical, verbal or sexual. He put no limits on what his character would do.

In the script - he's described in his late thirties - but obviously he's playing his own age here... and just from what he told me... his character is radically different from the script - which is a GOOD THING, cuz his character needed that. While there, I noticed a pen stain on his shirt - and I mentioned how I liked that detail and R. Lee beamed, "I got that from Kubrick. Not many people know this, but Stanley only had one type of shirt, a white shirt and every white shirt the man ever had had pen bleeds in the pocket... He always had his shirt pockets stuffed with pens and every one of em had stains." Isn't that humanizing? He evidently didn't believe in pocket protectors!

Now - could this be a decent film? Yeah it could. It could also suck- though from what I saw - there's no way it can be worse than the last two Chainsaw films... I just can't imagine that. While there, they told me they'd be bringing back sound effects very reminiscent of the original film, but mixed for a digital auditorium. They're going for very intense scares - at least that's what they claim to be aiming for, and they are very deliberately not apeing the first film.

Now the key things I've yet to know about this film is how good a director is Marcus Nispel. I know many of his crew didn't like him, but then I remember talking to a ton of Verhoeven's crew at a comic convention I did while he was shooting ROBOCOP who told me the movie was going to be absolute shit because the filmmaker was insane and stupid. Hell I even remember one FX guy saying that the effects looked like shit. So that isn't really where a film comes together. It comes together in post and right now... we haven't a clue how this film really feels yet. I don't know Marcus Nispel's video work - I know his reputation is to not like Romanek's but closer to the showy sorts like Bay and Simon West. So... basically I think we should back off the screaming about this one till we start hearing word on the film itself - I know the sets looked great - most of these buildings were found - and not even set dressed because they couldn't make them look creepier... and I mean that. The 'family' house... Ewwwww... just insane creepy yucky. A good movie could be made out these elements - but so could a bad film. I saw nothing to point me one way or another - only enough to think it might possibly work out.

When I last talked with them, they had no idea what they were going to do with the framing story - or the ending. They shot a couple of different things. Personally I hope they just refer to it as Marcus Nispel's TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE... because the framing story isn't all that hot - and not saying if it happened before or after the first film, but in the same time period - just a different group... another one of those missing cars on the highway... That's what is scary. That's what is creepy. We'll see. Personally I can't wait for the test screenings on this film to see if we have a decent CHAINSAW film... that'd be nice - I don't expect it to be a hair on the ass of the original... I just would like a cool Chainsaw film - I'm a fan - I have all the sequels on video and dvd... it'd be nice to have one that I felt really good about putting on. If not - I'll still end up watching it, but I'll just be miserable. I don't want to be miserable - but I know its an option and a possibility.