What Jerry Bruckheimer has done to the action movie, Michael Bay has now done to horror.

As producer of 2003’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and this year’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, Bay has transformed Tobe Hooper’s classic 1974 original into something glossy, formulaic and purely monetary—a boardroom picture with a predictable commercial life and no afterthought. Some critics gave the 2003 remake points for its stylized, green-hued look—confusing hackneyed music video techniques for David Fincher artfulness—but its slick, soulless aesthetic only underlined the movie’s lack of real imagination.

The new Texas Chainsaw series inherits what its producer has practiced on his work for years, from Armageddon to Pearl Harbor: strip a genre film down to its most exploitive essentials and bludgeon them, not as a means to a deeper end, but as the end itself. A sugar-rush distraction, not a movie.

Just like a successful Bruckheimer production rests on macho posturing (Bad Boys II) and a flurry of showdowns edited for the ADD (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest), Texas Chainsaw’s formula rests on what might as well be called the squishy factor. The more squishy sounds the movie makes—bust a head open, dice fingers for dinner, slice the skin off a forearm—the more money it makes.

Bodily fluids help: In the opening sequence, the audience watches in close-up as a childbearing woman’s amniotic fluids mix with the bloody emissions of labor. This is the “Birth of Fear,” as the tagline puts it—the origin story of the movie’s cult villain, Leatherface—but viewers with halfway decent bullshit detectors will notice something else: The birth of Hollywood’s new cash cow—horror remakes and retoolings—shouting out to old masters like Hooper while aggressively trying to top their gore quotient for no purpose but to awe.

The problem is not that there is too much gore (in Saw’s case, there isn’t nearly enough), or that Hollywood should return to psychological terror, as some prissy critics have argued. Vietnam-era cinema taught us that violent, messy horror is the natural response to a polarizing and dispiriting war abroad (reflected in the original Texas Chainsaw, but also in The Last House on the Left and Night of the Living Dead).

The same is true of post-9/11 horror, which confronts Americans’ deep-seated anxieties about the brutality of terrorism and the war in Iraq. The problem is inherent in the way this latest onslaught of blood and guts has been pitched to audiences. Hollywood treatments of the material are superficial at best, and offensive at worst.

The filmmakers understand what buttons to press to excite younger viewers—a squish here, a crunch there—but scarcely how to use them, and so they devolve into sick self-parodies. More than most, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning flails in an attempt to shock its viewers with all-new money shots. A background drama between two feuding brothers is completely obligatory, and connections between the story’s Vietnam-era setting and today are window dressing.

Instead, director Jonathan Liebesman carefully beautifies his grotesque set pieces with supermodel actors, period costumes and color filters—ugly things done up in pretty frames. It’s a hipster’s irony that’s disturbingly aloof to the visceral impact of its images. Characters suffer intermittent torture before the movie climaxes in total human destruction that easily surpasses Hooper’s original. All, it seems, for the much sillier purpose of offering the thrill-seeking audience a mindfuck. A truly depraved film can be cathartic, but nihilism without a solid purpose is a very scary thing—one thing this latest icky and stupid Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not.