The “contemptible” movie Roger Ebert urged people not to watch: “Vile, ugly, and brutal”
For the most part, a movie critic is supposed to be impartial and unbiased. It’s perfectly OK if they don’t like a particular film, but it still needs to be analysed and criticised objectively instead of a review being nothing but bile and vitriol. However, Roger Ebert felt compelled to make an exception on occasion.
As one of cinema’s most prominent critical voices, Ebert’s opinion carried more sway than almost all of his peers and contemporaries. And yet, despite urging anyone who’d listen to avoid a gruesome, grisly, and violent picture at all costs, his pleas fell on deaf ears when it made a killing at the box office.
Throughout his career, it became increasingly clear that horror wasn’t one of his favourite genres. While he appreciated some of the classics, a few cult favourites, and a couple of unsung gems, he was hardly head over heels with tales of blood, guts, and gore. Take Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, for example.
The 1974 original is one of the greatest and most influential horror movies ever made, but Ebert didn’t care for it one bit. As much as he appreciated that it was made with a certain degree of flair and craftsmanship, the plasma-splattered content left him cold on Leatherface’s debut.
Still, his middling response to the first instalment in the never-ending franchise paled in comparison to his assessment of Marcus Nispel’s 2003 remake, which inadvertently ignited the 21st-century craze for repurposing any horror flick with a shred of name value for a brand new audience.
“The new version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a contemptible film: vile, ugly, and brutal,” he wrote in his review. “There is not a shred of a reason to see it. Those who defend it will have to dance through mental hoops of their own devising, defining its meanness and despair as ‘style’ or ‘vision’ or ‘a commentary on our world.'”
Blasting it as an indefensible and purposeless orgy of barbarism and inhumanity, Ebert was convinced “the filmmakers want to cause disgust and hopelessness in the audience” instead of making a halfway decent picture. In fact, he was so abhorred that he urged everyone to give it a hard pass.
“Do yourself a favour,” he warned. “There are a lot of good movies playing right now that can make you feel a little happier, smarter, sexier, funnier, more excited, or more scared, if that’s what you want. This is not one of them. Don’t let it kill 98 minutes of your life.”
Sorry, Roger, but nobody listened. Despite his blistering assault on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and his desire to ensure nobody spent their money on a ticket, Nispel’s feature-length directorial debut recouped its budget more than ten times over at the box office and spawned two prequels and two reboots.
