The Texas Chainsaw Massacre


Horror. Starring Jessica Biel, Jonathan Tucker, Eric Balfour and R. Lee Ermey. Directed by Marcus Nispel. (R. 98 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.).

It becomes clear what kind of movie "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" is going to be in the first 10 minutes, when a camera lens focuses through the hole in the back of a suicide victim's head.

What follows is a film that will offend responsible parents, animal lovers, power-tool salesmen, rural sheriffs, meat-packers, Lynyrd Skynyrd fans and even the core admirers of the 1974 Tobe Hooper-directed original "Chainsaw."

The remaining twisted population that likes this kind of movie will enjoy a horror film that is surprisingly stylish. "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" may be an abomination, but it still delivers at least a $5 matinee price worth of scares, gore and homicidal killers who, no matter how many times you hit them, keep coming back.

The new "Chainsaw," directed by newcomer Marcus Nispel, also takes place in the early 1970s but quickly strays from the plot of the spooky and bizarre low- budget original. Instead of a woman and her friends investigating a grandfather's desecrated burial plot, these five companions (including "7th Heaven" star Jessica Biel and "Six Feet Under" troublemaker Eric Balfour) are headed to a Skynyrd concert.

A crazy family, a farmhouse and the human-skin-wearing Leatherface are at the core of the new "Chainsaw," which also focuses on a backwoods sheriff played by "Full Metal Jacket" boot-camp tyrant R. Lee Ermey. But the movie -- produced by the director of "Bad Boys II" and the creator of television's "Are You Hot?" -- adds just enough over-the-top cliches from modern horror films to alienate serious fans of the original.

Leatherface (Andrew Bryniarski enigmatic and creepy in Hooper's movie, has become little more than Jason from "Friday the 13th" with a higher limit on his Home Depot gift card. And there is, of course, a modern sprinkler system in the family's otherwise run-down meat-packing plant, because that's the easiest way to get Biel's T-shirt wet (apparently backwoods homicidal killers are concerned about fire codes).

The biggest stars in the film are production designer Gregory Blair and director of photography Daniel C. Pearl, who was Hooper's cinematographer on the original. Whether it's a graveyard of cars in an overgrown field or a trailer home that hasn't been cleaned in decades, attention to detail does more to create a horrific mood than anything in the script.

But unlike movies such as "Seven," there isn't enough style in the new "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" to justify the bloodbath, and it's riddled with too much been-there-done-that to endure as a classic.

Advisory: This film contains graphic violence and sexual situations.

-- Peter Hartlaub



Drag comedy. Starring Jack Plotnick, Clinton Leupp, Jeffery Roberson. Directed by Richard Day. (R. 79 minutes. At the Lumiere).

I thought I was sick of drag, but no -- I was only sick of drag queens, and the sentiment, even reverence, with which they've been treated in movies of the past dozen or so years. Pictures such as "Torch Song Trilogy" and "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" -- morose, laugh-clown-laugh wallows in self- pity and false glory -- could make anyone forget that drag, when done well, is funny. Really funny.

Now comes along "Girls Will Be Girls" to make us remember. In the straight- faced, meticulous and dead-on hilarious tradition of the great Charles Pierce and the Bay Area's late, lamented Sluts a-Go-Go troupe, the film stars men in women's roles. These men don't have to push it. In just observing and accurately reproducing women's facial expressions and physical gestures, the men create a wonderfully absurd spectacle.

They are aided by a caustic script that doesn't let in a single ray of light. The movie is about three roommates: Evie (Jack Plotnick), an aging actress with an alcohol problem; Coco (Clinton Leupp), who longs for romance and a child; and Varla (Jeffery Roberson), a plump and perky young thing who arrives in Hollywood and almost immediately becomes a prostitute. The movie follows each of the women, but Evie -- sexually ravenous and repellent, cruelly ambitious but completely past having any kind of career -- is the writer-director Richard Day's best creation.

In Evie, we have a character completely without conscience, so that almost everything she says is appalling: "Your mother offed herself -- excuse me -- passed herself away." Her drunken ramble through her apartment is a side- splitting spoof of the kind of scene that was a staple of every good Joan Crawford or Susan Hayward film. Equally priceless is her self-advertising infomercial, complete with songs, stories and a laugh track.

An undeniable key to the success of "Girls Will Be Girls" is that the filmmaker knew when to quit. At 79 minutes, the movie is short but sweet. At 99 minutes, it would have been too much of a good thing.

Advisory: This film contains sexual references and drug use.

-- Mick LaSalle



Drama. Starring Val Kilmer, Lisa Kudrow, Kate Bosworth, Dylan McDermott and Josh Lucas. Directed by James Cox. Written by James Cox, Captain Mauzner, Todd Samovitz and D. Loriston Scott. (R. 104 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

If you ever find yourself idly wondering what life was like in the hard- drug underworld of Los Angeles circa 1981, "Wonderland" provides an unambiguous answer: as bad as it gets. It was sordid, brutal and depressing, and I'm not just talking about the sideburns on the male characters. Cheap shot, but the movie inspires jokes in spite of itself.

The real-life events depicted in "Wonderland" are anything but funny. They are lurid in the extreme, culminating in bloody multiple murders at a drug den in Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon, a case involving the washed-up and strung-out porno actor John Holmes. Four people were bludgeoned to death at the party house, and a fifth survived horrible injuries.

The killings appear to have been retaliation for the robbery and humiliation of Eddie Nash, a Los Angeles nightclub owner and drug dealer. Holmes, the film's central figure, was tried for the murders in 1982, and acquitted. (He died of AIDS-related illness in 1988. Nash eventually served time for the murders.) The film offers conflicting accounts of Holmes' role in the massacre -- was he forced to participate or did he simply tell Nash who had ripped him off?

Despite Val Kilmer's game attempt to humanize Holmes, "Wonderland" never really makes us care about the answer. Kilmer has made a specialty of playing fringe figures dancing on the edge of the abyss ("The Doors," of course, and more recently, "The Salton Sea"). His Holmes certainly lives up to the description provided by another character as a "scumbag, stone thief and bad news." Though Holmes was a freebase addict, Kilmer endows him with a sort of boyish charm that would at least partly explain why his wife (played with dignity by Lisa Kudrow) never divorced him and why his girlfriend (Kate Bosworth) put up with his crummy antics, despite her extreme youth. He's a strange mixture of infantile and ruthless.

Director James Cox conveys all this through a sickly yellowish haze and employs a range of MTV-style tricks to breathe some life into the stoned milieu. The killings are shown, mercifully, in a very underlit sequence, though they're still nothing for the faint of heart. Cox also lured a fairly remarkable cast of names, including Dylan McDermott playing, unexpectedly, a sleazy biker-type ex-con, Josh Lucas as a ferocious addict-psychopath and Tim Blake Nelson as a party-house habitue and one of the eventual victims. Eric Bogosian is slyly nasty as Nash, and Carrie Fisher pops up as a Christian who tries to help Bosworth's character. A few others (Janeane Garofalo, Christina Applegate) have small roles and are all but unrecognizable.

If for some reason you are fascinated by the Wonderland murders, look up the Rolling Stone article of 1989 that brought national attention to the gruesome case. Otherwise, your local cineplex has lots of choices with more redeeming social value..

Advisory: This film contains strong language, frequent drug use and heavy violence.

-- Walter Addiego



Drama. Starring Chiara Mastroianni, Angela Molina, Lio, Lucia Sanchez, Esther Gorintin and Marilyne Even. Directed and written by Delphine Gleize. (Not rated. 130 minutes. At the Castro Theatre and Rafael Film Center.)

There's a genre of film that's ideal for intelligent filmgoers. It's the one that threads multiple stories at once, letting a single incident expose the disparate connections among people who may be strangers. "Thirteen Conversations About One Thing" epitomizes the genre, as does "Amores Perros," and now there's "Carnage," a wonderful French offering whose jumping-off point is a bullfight.

A TV network is broadcasting from a bull ring in southern Spain, where a young, handsome matador is challenging a ferocious bull. The matador is gored and suffers a life-threatening kidney wound. Watching from her home in northern France is a cute girl, whose parents will ultimately meet (thanks to the dead bull's remains, some of which are used for dog bones) an Italian actress who's struggling with her love life and her self-image. In death, the bull will link other characters in this quixotic drama, including the girl's teacher and mother, a taxidermist and his deaf father, and the matador and his friends.

Funny, ironic (in the best sense of the word), dramatic, sweet and metaphorical, "Carnage" never lets go of its witty mix. The characters who populate Delphine Gleize's first full-length film are all imbued with multidimensionality, including the girl, who has a medical condition that requires her to take Valium, and the bull. Yes, the bull. It turns out that he was blind in one eye -- a revelation that lets one character (a philandering scientist) ruminate about the nature of danger and deceiving appearances.

A filmmaker to watch, Gleize (who is French) doesn't need cinematic tricks to create cinematic tension. She uses ambiguity and her characters' hidden agendas to great effect, and she gets inspired performances from an ensemble cast that includes Chiara Mastroianni (the daughter of Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni) and Angela Molina (daughter of Antonio Molina).

Advisory: This film contains scenes of death.

-- Jonathan Curiel



Drama. Starring Clara Khoury, Khalifa Natour, Ismael Dabbag and Walid Abed Elsalam. Directed by Hany Abu-Assad. Written by Liana Badr and Ihab Lamey. (Not rated. 90 minutes. In Arabic with English subtitles. At the Roxie.)

You're a young Palestinian woman in East Jerusalem, and you're in love with a theater director whom your conservative father loathes. He wants you to marry from his list of men, and he gives you a deadline: Decide by 4 p.m. At that point, he leaves for Egypt, where he'll be unable to give his personal OK to any man you've chosen.

Hany Abu-Assad has made a bittersweet film that tells the story of Palestinian life as eloquently as anything ever done. The characters in "Rana's Wedding" are suffocated by Israeli checkpoints and restrictions, but that doesn't stop them from trying to lead "normal lives," including the universal ritual of marriage.

Rana (Clara Khoury) isn't some radicalized Hamas supporter; in fact, though her family is Muslim, she seems avowedly secular and prefers to wear form- fitting clothing that might as well be from an L.L. Bean catalog. Like her love, Khalil, Rana is used to following her bliss -- but unlike Khalil (who works in the West Bank town of Ramallah, where roadblocks pose a daily hardship), she lives a relatively sheltered and privileged life in Jerusalem. Her father's ultimatum has the unintended effect of making her more defiant -- and more conscious (as she tries to visit Khalil) of the deep quagmire that defines Israeli-Palestinian relations.

It's not giving anything away to say that Rana tries to beat the 4 p.m. deadline. The plan that unfolds features as many emotional detours (including Rana's doubts about Khalil) as physical ones (including shortcuts past checkpoints). "Rana's Wedding" works so well because Abu-Assad lets the narrative unfold in completely surprising and realistic ways, and he lets Khoury's expressions and exasperations -- not heavy-handed dialogue -- set many scenes. Khoury, who is in nearly every scene, is formidable.

A piano motif adds a perfect layer to "Rana's Wedding." Rana learned piano as a child (we learn during the opening credits), and Abu-Assad adds evocative music throughout the film to signify Rana's memories and feelings, and to emphasize transitions. The last scene (which incorporates Mahmoud Darwish's poem "State of Siege" is an unforgettable coda to a film that deserves the acclaim it got previously at Cannes and other international film festivals.

Advisory: This film contains scenes of violence..

-- Jonathan Curiel



Science fiction. Starring Takeshi Kaneshiro, Anne Suzuki and Goro Kishitani.

Directed by Takeshi Yamazaki. (R. 118 minutes. At the Galaxy.)

After years of watching Americans churn out blockbusters that recycle the ideas of unsung Japan filmmakers, director Takeshi Yamazaki sets the record straight in a single film.

"Returner" is less a new Japanese movie than a series of scenes from old American ones, most notably "The Terminator" and "ET." Only subtitles and a few borrowed ideas from the Japan-born video game Metal Gear Solid prevent the movie from looking like an American Film Institute clip show.

That's not to say the little-girl-goes-back-in-time-tosave-humankind movie is flat-out horrible. With little room for new ideas, the film must rely on the strength of its actors, and they're excellent across the board.

Anne Suzuki plays Milly, a young warrior who hops into the time machine from "Stargate" to prevent an alien force from destroying the human race. Faster than you can say, "I'm looking for Sarah Connor," Milly finds loner gunman Miyamoto (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who must work with her to stop a vicious crime lord (Goro Kishitani) and prevent the invasion.

American directors make plenty of sophomoric movies with bad special effects ("Dungeons & Dragons" and "Reign of Fire," to name two), but they never get talent as good as Kaneshiro. The long-haired hunk has a serious Han Solo thing going, and is particularly roguish when dealing with Milly, who brings out the best in the brooding anti-hero.

"Returner" would get a stronger recommendation if it weren't for the following paradox: With its Saturday morning cartoon plot and "Battlestar Galactica"-era special effects, the movie seems aimed at prepubescent boys. But the stark violence, including more than one execution-style killing of innocent civilians, makes it inappropriate for children.

That leaves a small demographic for "Returner" -- 12-year-olds who are skilled at talking adults into buying R-movie tickets.

Director Yamazaki was inspired as a youngster by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg films. "Returner" has the same sense of humor and adventurous pace that make the film's cliches bearable.

Advisory: This film contains several scenes of brutal violence.

-- Peter Hartlaub