10 Horror Movies Critics Were Way Too Harsh On
4. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
Taking a glance at review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 2003's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a meagre 37% rating from critics.
Make no mistake about it, the horror genre is one riddled with awful remake, after terrible reboot, after needless reimagining, after unwanted recalibration. Horror is a marvellous corner of cinema, yet it's one that far too frequently sees old ideas rehashed and revisited - with the end result usually being something utterly inferior to what has gone before.
In the case of Marcus Nispel's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, that was one of those rare do-overs that was actually good. Of course, it wasn't as good as Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but that was always going to be the case.
Nispel's movie followed pretty much the same beats of Hooper's classic, but it gave a welcome, brutal fresh lick of paint to Leatherface that firmly re-established the character as one of horror's greatest villains; him having had some of that killer edge removed in the three sequels that followed Hooper's 1974 picture.
To Marcus Nispel's credit, he also deserves praise for what he did with his Friday the 13th remake. Playing like a greatest hits of the first three entries in the main franchise, the 2009 F13 managed to be respectful to the property while being its own refreshing beast.