.: Roberts' Reviews - Movie Reviews :.

October has always been my favorite month for movies. The summer slush is over and done with. The Oscar contenders begin their march to glory starting with their premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival. And horror films are released in abundance as the month whittles its way down to Halloween night.

First out of the chute in 2006 is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre : The Beginning which goes back rather than forward to show us how chainsaw wielding Leatherface and his family of freaks began their bloody rampage.

Why go back in time you non-genre followers might ask. Well to put it quite simply, certain characters were either met with dismemberment or death in the 2004 remake and once the box office receipts were in and the movie was an unmitigated success, it was easier to go back in time and give everyone a fresh kick of the blood soaked can.

Whether they went backwards, forwards or even sideways didn't mean that the producers could ignore the rules for a horror sequel. There must be more blood. There must be more terror. There must be a more bodies.

On all three of these fronts, Texas Chainsaw Massacre : The Beginning scores - but more on that later.

The Beginning starts in August 1939. A female worker in Lee's Slaughterhouse is working alone when she falls to the floor and begins to give birth. To say complications abound would be an understatement. As blood runs down between her legs a deformed child soon appears from under her dress. The woman does not survive the birth of her child and the baby is wrapped in meatpacking paper and put into the dumpsters out back.

It is here that a scavenger woman looking for meat comes across the baby (one Thomas Hewitt) and brings him/it back to her house to raise as her own. The years quickly flash away and before we are finished with the opening credits, it is July 1969 and we have seen more blood on the screen than we do through complete running times of some horror films.

The body count has already totaled three before we meet the main characters of the film. They total four and are evenly split, two male, two female. The names of either the actors or the characters they portray is unimportant as they might as well be wearing name tags reading, "Victim #1", "Victim #2" etc.

This prey is expected to die. That is why we buy the ticket. How they die is how we expect to be entertained. Over the next hour plus, we will see people filleted, eaten, stabbed, shot, and of course, chainsawed. Each death seems more gruesome than the last and little time is spent between each terrifying moment.

By the time we get to the conclusion (to which you kinda know how the Leatherface and clan will end up due to the release two years back), more blood has been spilled, more terror has been infused and more bodies have been laid to pasture (or at least brought to the dinner table).

Fans of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre will be ripe in their element for The Beginning. Being able to watch as Leatherface picks up a chainsaw for the first time, has his first kill and transforms into the monster that has graced our multi-plexes since the late 1970's is a real treat. By the time Leatherface saws through his final victim of the film, it is a proud moment. Like when your teenage son passes his driving test. There is a right of passage. All the preparation seems worth the wait.

But is the film worth our while? Unfortunately, the answer is no. The Beginning fails by offering us nothing new. Nothing that hasn't been done before.

True, the film does have a lot to live up to. The first Texas Chainsaw Massacre released in 1974 is considered by some to be a masterpiece of horror for its genre and the film landscape at the time. It shocked audiences worldwide and catapulted Leatherface into a Horror-Hall-Of-Fame that would later have such alumni as Jason Voorhes and Freddy K. Australia banned the film until 1982 and Entertainment Weekly recently named it the second scariest film of all time right behind The Exorcist.

But even without the type that preceded The Beginning, the movie fails to click on levels that the best horror films exploit. The Beginning just doesn't offer anything that you don't expect long before the unsuspecting victims come to the same realization. Even the plot is similar to the first. A small group of youngins get stranded in the desert and are soon captured, tortured and eventually killed all for the enjoyment of the paying customer. Sure, some side story involving bikers are thrown in for good measure, but that doesn't last long and doesn't provide much story either.

Horror fans will hate me, but I could not help but think of The Beginning as a kind of Attack of the Clones type film. It was an attempt to go back and show how our favorite characters came to be, but neither attempt put our characters in any developing story that is of any interest to the cult loving followers.

Horror fans will undoubtedly head to the theatre in zombie droves this week-end to seek the truth themselves. I am sure half will be satisfied with the amount of blood and guts that gets spilled while they reach into their popcorn bag while reveling in the fact that they finally got to see Leatherface try his hand at being a human skin seamstress for the first time.

But then there will be the second half. My half. Those that wanted so badly for the movie not only to reveal the character's backstory, but also develop into a movie that would make us yearn for another sequel. Alas, this is not that film.