Chainsaw Massacre wins bloody box office battle

It was a gruesome affair at the top of the US movie chart today with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre knocking Kill Bill off the top spot.

The remake of the 1974 chainsaw horror took €26.2m at the box office over the weekend, ahead of Quentin Tarantino’s latest bloody offering which made €11.2m.

Initial figures make The Texas Chainsaw Massacre the second biggest US box office opener, behind October 2002’s Red Dragon.

It also meant that Kill Bill, starring Uma Thurman as an assassin, was knocked from the number one spot.

The murderous antics of chainsaw wielding Leatherface, in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, are loosely based on real life mass murderer Ed Gein.

The movie became a cult hit in the 1970s despite a savaging by the critics.

The New York Daily News, at the time, called it a “violent piece of junk”.

“Two of the girls get to do a lot of screaming. I could have screamed, too, for wasting my time,” a critic wrote.

Jessica Biel, who stars in the remake, puts the new movie’s success down to its wide appeal.

“There’s a huge generation of younger kids who have not even seen the original,” she told USA Today.

“And then there are the cult fans.

“Then there’s my parents’ generation who watched it as kids.”