WOE IS me. Oh, the piece of my life that has up and gone, and been flushed down the toilet along with the piece of excrement that is this unredeemable remake of the 1974 horror classic.

In the Atomic Kitten vein of "let's take a perfectly good piece of culture that someone made, eat it up and spit it out again in a very similar, yet somehow deeply offensive manner", first-time director Marcus Nispel has, for some mysterious reason, remade a film which has already been copied, parodied, and downright ripped-off approximately one bizillion times already.

I would be happy enough if this review simply asked "why?" 350 times - the sum total of everything I was thinking while watching it, as the unpleasant sense of dj vu began to wash over me like the lurgy. Not another group of teens who are out in hillbilly country and might as well be wearing signs that read "slice open here".

The ever-so-slight alterations to the original's "plot" mean that the gang pick up a girl from the road who promptly shoots herself in the head after dramatically stage whispering "They're all dead".

Ooh, calm my knocking knees.

So after a tediously prolonged debate on what to do with the corpse, they have a few fights and call out the local law enforcement.

Insert chase, stab, chase, chase, chainsaw, chase, oooh he nearly gets them, death, chase here ... and so on until oblivion.

The film is entirely without terror. Maybe I have seen too many horror flicks but you can never be immune to a good shock moment, and these are sadly absent here.

The location anxiety it suffers from - big house, empty house, slaughterhouse, car park - mean that no tension is accrued whatsoever.

Nispel seems to think he's making his student graduation film, what with his ludicrously backlit Hewitt home and tons of ironic scenes wherein Leatherface chases the big-breasted one through a load of dead meat - geddit?

The only thing which needed massacring here was the whole notion in the first place.