There's only one thing to ask yourself before you buy a ticket to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Do you really want to subject yourself to 99 minutes of unrelenting horror, suspense and gore?
If you're the least bit squeamish, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not for you.
Director Marcus Nispel is hell-bent on making this the mother of gross-out horror flicks and he pulls out all the stops.
As if the basic concept of Texas Chainsaw Massacre isn't chilling enough, Nispel piles one stomach-churning scene upon another.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a remake of a 1974 ultra-low-budget slash-and-gash from Tobe Hooper, who went on to direct Salem's Lot and Poltergeist.
It was inspired by a true story of cannibalism and mutilation, but Hooper and his co-conspirators never let the facts get in the way of a good fright fest.
They came up with a tale of five young friends who pick up a female hitchhiker terrified by what has happened to her.
Instead of driving away from the scene of her terror, the unsuspecting quintet drive into the heart of the nightmare.
A backwoods family is hiding a demented family member whose face is so hideous, he peels the skin off fresh victims to make new masks.
He's the Frankenstein monster in the basement and he wields a chainsaw instead of a hatchet, knife or axe.
That's all you need to know, except that the body count will be at least five or six and the deaths will be increasingly monstrous.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre instantly begat a host of similar slasher flicks, including Friday the 13th, Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street, and it has kept on begetting more ever since.
Jeepers Creepers and Wrong Turn are virtually paint-by-number duplicates of Chainsaw.
What makes this new version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre so genuinely creepy are the production values.
Everything from the camera work, music and makeup to the editing is light-years ahead of what we've come to expect and tolerate in slasher movies.
The same is true of the acting.
The young people who become fodder for the ghouls are usually caricature.
Not so here.
They are believable and that's what makes it all so scary. We can see ourselves in them and we empathize with their reactions.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a scary and nauseating film, which is precisely what it set out to be and that's what makes it such a cut above the rest.
(This film is rated 18-A)
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