Not content with remaking Tobe Hooper's landmark horror movie The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in 2003, producer Michael Bay returns with this lacklustre prequel. Set in 1969, it promises to reveal the origins of chainsaw killer Leatherface (Andrew Bryniarski), a social misfit goaded into murder by his sadistic adoptive father (R Lee Ermey). Unfortunately, Sheldon Turner's inane script saddles this once-great horror movie icon with such an uninspired backstory that it would have been better left untold. Jonathan Liebesman can't match remake director Marcus Nispel's angular, music-video visuals, but efficiently culls his young cast (led by Jordana Brewster) in a series of disturbingly nihilistic torture scenes. Careless attempts to invoke the original's muted sense of Vietnam-era social breakdown only emphasise this noisy, cynical film's glaring absence of politics or, indeed, point.

Chrissie and her friends set out on a road trip for a final fling before one is shipped off to Vietnam. Along the way, bikers harass the foursome and cause an accident that throws Chrissie from the vehicle. The lawman who arrives on the scene kills one of the bikers and brings Chrissie's friends to the Hewitt homestead, where young Leatherface is learning the tools of terror.