Face-Off: Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning vs. Leatherface

The Hewitt family lives in a dying town. The local slaughterhouse has been condemned, there are no more jobs, no money, no food. Even the last remaining law enforcement officer is planning to pack it up and move on. But the Hewitts have no intention of leaving their home… and family member Charlie has some experience with taking desperate measures to survive with no food. (Or at least that’s what he claims.) He says he was a P.O.W. during the Korean War, and that he and his fellow captured soldiers had to resort to cannibalism to keep from starving to death. If it worked in Korea, it can certainly work for a family in the Texas countryside. While I don’t fully believe that this family would so quickly dive into the cannibal lifestyle, the explanation for their murderous ways that THE BEGINNING provides is one that works well enough for the Hewitts.

THE BEGINNING is set just 4 years before TEXAS CHAINSAW ’03, but we still get to see how Charlie Hewitt went from his regular farmer self to stealing the identity of a police officer and becoming Sheriff Hoyt. In a rather comedic bit, we also see how Uncle Monty lost both of his legs. Charlie/Hoyt really steals the show here, as the majority of the film is about the torture he deals out to some captive youths. He pushes his family forward into becoming kill-crazy cannibals, and everyone else just goes along with it. Since it’s the same actors returning to these roles very soon after making the remake, it’s easy for them to be right in line with the way they were presented in the other movie.

The remake set up the fact that Leatherface suffers from a skin condition he was mocked mercilessly for on the schoolyard, and I can’t tell you how glad I am that THE BEGINNING doesn’t show any of that. After showing the deformed baby’s birth in a slaughterhouse in 1939, the film jumps ahead to ’69, by which time Leatherface is already a mute, hulking brute who wears a leather mask over his deformities and works in the slaughterhouse. He starts the killing when he goes into a rage and murders his scumbag boss, but luckily his uncle Charlie is just fine with homicide. As the film goes on, we see Leatherface commit his first chainsaw murder, start chopping people like he did the animals at the slaughterhouse, and replace his leather mask with a face peeled off of one of his victims. He doesn’t really evolve during the film,he just becomes what he has always been capable of being.

There are important kills that take the Hewitts down the path of taking over their town and becoming cannibals – the murders of Leatherface’s boss and the local sheriff – and there are some random ones, like a biker couple the family kills and cooks. The story centers on a pair of brothers who are about to go off to fight in the Vietnam War, although one of them would rather dodge the draft and run away, which sets up an interesting conflict with patriotic veteran Hoyt. The brothers’ girlfriends are also in the mix, one of them is our final girl heroine, but it’s the brothers who really benefit from an attempt to give their characters some depth.

THE BEGINNING sets up the things we’ll see in TCM ’03 to a ridiculous degree, answering questions that never needed to be answered. Not only do we see how the family started killing and how Leatherface started using a chainsaw and wearing human face masks, this even deals with minutiae like “Why does Hoyt have false teeth?” Who ever even asked that question? There is a missing character who should have been present in this prequel, but that’s the only thing left up in the air. Beyond that, this prequel filled in every blank imaginable.