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[Photo: New Line Cinema]

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a remake of the 1974 slasher film, showed promise of being true to the original; then an attack of glitches brought the screening to a dead halt.

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Monday night's screening of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was butchered by an AMC Veterans 24 projectionist who spliced reels upside down, backward and out of order, ending the show for a couple of hundred viewers after only 35 minutes. Everybody received passes to see the movie when it opens, and a critics' rescreening was scheduled too late for Weekend review.

But two correctly constructed reels were enough to suggest that this is one remake of a classic movie that works. Marcus Nispal, a music video director making his feature film debut, had me feeling edgy and grossed-out in a good way, just like Tobe Hooper's original 1974 shocker.

What was the filmmaker doing right? For starters, he shows a distinct reverence for Hooper's movie, beginning with hiring actor John Larroquette to do the prologue narration as he did in the original, his first film gig. Nispal also hired Hooper's cinematographer Daniel Pearl, who incorporated a few tricks from The Blair Witch Project to create a chilling pseudodocumentary feel. Even as the plot deviated from the original, Nispal was creating a suitable companion piece to a touchstone of modern movie horror.

Again, the story concerns road-tripping students picking up a hitchhiker, leading to deadly encounters with a sadistic rural family living in a slaughterhouse. Scott Kosar's adapted screenplay shuffles a few things: The hitchhiker this time is an escaped female victim rather than a psychotic family member, and her outburst that sets the plot in motion is more graphic than before, including a camera trick by Pearl that is the most artistically sick moment I've seen on screen in a long, long time.

Jessica Biel (The Rules of Attraction) was being set up as an updated Marilyn Burns, the scream queen who will get the worst of the deal before (we hope) escaping. Character actor R. Lee Ermey (Full Metal Jacket) was chewing the scenery in a new role as a sheriff with dark underpinnings of his own. The ominous Leatherface had just made his first appearance, re-creating a bludgeoning from the first film. Then the projection went haywire, leaving disappointed viewers to wonder what would happen next.

Another hour remained, plenty of time for any movie to go in any direction, especially in a slasher genre so packed with cliches. But The Texas Chainsaw Massacre seemed well on its way to being a cut above all the other dead-meat-on-parade flicks.

Check Friday's Page 2B for a full review to see if Nispal carried through on that promise.

- STEVE PERSALL, Times film critic