The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning

Audiences will start playing the 'Who's Next' game as people run, scream and die, and the whole thing loses the power that this horrific creation once had over cinema.

It's neither as bad as it could have been, nor as interesting as it should have been, and the final desultory reaction is a decidedly minor one.

Gross and sadistic but never scary.

Oppressive, mean-spirited and sadistic, The Beginning is an unsavoury exercise in cruelty and pain that one hopes will also be the end.

Andrew Bryniarski is the definitive Leatherface, as R. Lee Ermey is the definitive Texas country cannibal paterfamilias, in this underrated horror gem.

At least no one stumbles and falls during drawn-out foot chases.

Your run-of-the-mill horror film.

It's actually closer to the original Chainsaw than its immediate predecessor, but it still relies on more on physical torture than the psychological terror that made the original - or any genuinely scary movie - so effective.