“Clean goat is a happy goat.”

Two brothers (Taylor Handley, Matthew Bomer) and their girlfriends (Jordana Brewster, Diora Baird) are on a last hurrah of a road trip before the brothers jet off overseas to fight the Viet Cong. Unfortunately, they only make it a little ways down a backcountry Texas byway before demolishing a rogue cow—with a little help from an aggressive biker chick (Cyia Batten)—flipping their vehicle in the process. Doubly unfortunate is that they are discovered by Charlie Hewitt (R. Lee Emrey) AKA “Sheriff Hoyt,” the demented sadist who recently murdered the real lawkeeper (Lew Temple) and subsequently donned his uniform. He’s also the father of Thomas Hewitt, colloquially known as Leatherface. You know the drill from here—torture, torment, cannibalism, wanton cruelty, imaginative grue.

Trading in pot-smoking for draft dodging as the crime du jour, Jonathan Liebesman’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning treads the much same path as the film to which it serves as a prequel (Marcus Nispel’s remake of Tobe Hooper’s original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), only, precisely because it’s a prequel, we are subjected to unnecessary bits of backstory. To wit, we witness an episode that informs us why Uncle Monty (Terrence Evans) has no legs and a colostomy bag in the earlier film. We learn about Thomas’ distressing birth on a factory floor of a meat plant, his adoption and upbringing by the Hewitt clan, his first murder. We even get a reason for the family’s cannibalism (desperate times, desperate measures).

But the original was so effective at inducing dread because, among other things, its family of cannibal terrorizers seemed to materialize out of the ether, or maybe to be hiding in plain sight. There wasn’t a logical cause and effect chain that led to the nightmare. Here Leatherface is transformed from a mythical bogeyman into a mentally-handicapped brute raised by degenerates—a revelation much less frightening than leaving the stone unturned. Though more or less competently made (well, the screenplay’s got some major holes, but no one’s approaching this expecting tight narrative cohesion), The Beginning ultimately serves little purpose beyond an exercise in carnage, falling short in terms of mood, suspense, and resonance. It’s all surface, no depth.

Once again the producers decided to go with a yet-to-be-released-in-the-film’s-chronology song (Free’s ‘All Right Now’), but at least movie buffs are given an early opportunity to point out a reference to Apocalypse Now. Oh wait, that film didn’t come out for another ten years! Anyway, moving on with my life, or at least onto Texas Chainsaw 3D.