Texas Chainsaw 3D (R) ★

Good news, everyone! The first terrible movie of 2013 is in theaters, in both 2D and barely 3D, and it's called Texas Chainsaw! The special effects are terrible, the plot is riddled with holes, and it's unintentionally funny. The upside is that it's funnier than Parental Guidance, and Leatherface is looking at least as rough around the edges as Billy Crystal. The downside is that any horror fan will be disappointed by its cheap, tacky-looking effects, and people who shelled out the extra money for 3D are being taken for a ride.

As fans of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre know, you can make a bloody great horror movie for not a lot of dough. Part of the charm of the first was its gritty, sleazy aftertaste, and the crazy family dynamics of an all-male clan whose most-bullied member is a giant freak who wears other people's faces on top of his face. It was a fairly simple set-up loosely based on Ed Gein's propensity for digging up corpses, decorating his home with their body parts, and wearing the skin of dead ladies. Unlike other horror movies, there wasn't a great formula that could be replicated over and over again — no Crystal Lake with horny teens or endless nightmares to invade — so most of the follow-ups have tried to untangle the Sawyer family tree. As the wonderful/terrible Drayton Sawyer says in the wonderfully bonkers Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, ''The saw is family!'' Would that filmmakers would just leave it at that.

The latest Chainsaw tries to add another branch to its tree with the arrival of Heather (Alexandra Daddario), a young woman who finds out that she was adopted, if you can call being stolen from the arms of her dying mother after hicks burned her house down "adopted." Heather is part of the infamous Sawyer clan, and a cousin of Leatherface, and she's inherited a strangely fancy old house somewhere in Texas from a grandmother she never knew she had. She also inherits Leatherface, who lurks in the basement, but she doesn't realize that until after he's killed all of her friends because she forgot to read her grandmother's letter until it's too late. But by then, the mantra ''Family is family'' has been drilled into her, and the script has been flipped; the monster that killed her friends and countless others is the victim of cruel townspeople who killed her family. (To be fair, Heather's friends were stultifyingly dumb and boring and deserved to be killed.)

What makes this iteration so puzzling is that it features footage at the very beginning from the original movie, which leads longtime fans to believe it will fit into that particular family configuration, as opposed to later movies that added in random family members. Instead, Chainsaw veers crazily in another direction and actually creates an entirely different family history that doesn't make sense on its own terms or in the original first two Chainsaw movies.

Texas Chainsaw had no less than four people involved in its script (the story was by Adam Marcus, Debra Sullivan and Kirsten Elms, while Marcus, Sullivan and Stephen Susco are the credited screenwriters), which could explain why it's such a mess. The 3D is a joke; occasionally Leatherface will thrust the chainsaw at the screen or, even better, someone will throw the chainsaw. While the gore will definitely be too much for the squeamish, it looks like bargain basement Halloween effects to the eye of an experienced horror movie fan. The cast isn't much better; Bill Moseley, who appeared in the second movie, plays a young Drayton Sawyer since the original actor, Jim Siedow, died in 2003. Marilyn Burns, who played the final girl in the original movie, shows up briefly as Heather's grandmother in a flashback. Daddario isn't given much to work with, so it seems almost unfair to judge her based on this performance; her co-stars, especially singer/songwriter Trey Songz, are uniformly terrible. Even Leatherface, played by Dan Yeager, seems exhausted by this whole ordeal. The original Leatherface, Gunnar Hansen, appears in the beginning as one of the Sawyer clan. One can only imagine what he and Burns talked about around craft services.

Hollywood.com rated this film 1 star.