Metacritic reviews

The whole fear-of-obese-hillbillies device is starting to smell as stale as Leatherface's playroom. Does this horror trend simply reflect a national fear, as giant radioactive ants personified the Bomb in the 1950s? If so, maybe it's time for us all to go on a diet; America needs fresh fodder for its boogeymen.

Few surprises lie in store for connoisseurs of torture cinema, though unlike its 2003 predecessor, this Massacre owes less to Bay’s attention-deficient aesthetics than to the measured, Georgia O’Keefe-on-acid sensibility that guided Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel’s much-cannibalized original.

Mindlessly repeats the archetypal "Chainsaw" scenario.

"The Beginning" is a better movie than the 2003 remake, even if the plot is understandably similar. There are only so many ways hapless teens can get brutally slaughtered, after all, but Liebesman and company keep things appropriately creepy, right down to aping the look of the 1974 original.

Just another trip down a very dusty road.

Misses everything that made the first one eat into your spine like meningitis.

Who will survive and what will be left of them? If you don't have a pretty good idea, this is not the movie for you. If you do, rest assured you've seen it all before.

Liebesman hews close to the 2003 pic’s bile-tinged snuff-film aesthetic. His approach falls somewhere between the overwrought sadism of the “Saw” series and the giddy gore-for-gore’s-sake energy of “The Devil’s Rejects,” sharing those films’ twisted notion that today’s auds are willing to embrace such homicidal maniacs as heroes.

Unlike "Hostel" or "Wolf Creek," TCM:B is rank and depressing.

If watching people having their faces cut off, getting their legs amputated and having their throats tenderly slit is your idea of a horrific good time, you'll certainly get your money's worth here.