Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995)

 

A group of teenagers get into a car crash in the Texas woods on prom night, and then wander into an old farmhouse that is home to Leatherface and his insane family of cannibalistic psychopaths.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation is a 1995 American slasher film written and directed by Kim Henkel, and starring Renée Zellweger, Matthew McConaughey, and Robert Jacks as Leatherface.

Not sure what to make of this film. You have a young McConaughey and a young Zellwegar in a film that could have derailed their careers. Fortunately for them it didn't come out until after they became stars. MCconaughey is a deranged, bug-eyed hillbilly with a remote-controlled leg, and Renee Zellweger as a "teen" victim, running, screaming, and jumping through windows!

The film is your basic teenagers on the way home from the prom get lost and stuck and run into spooky family in the middle of nowhere - mayhem ensues. One of the biggest gripes that people have with this film (which is saying a lot, because there is nothing but stuff to gripe about) is that Leatherface seems to have become a transvestite.

If looks could kill he woudn't need a chainsaw

Why the focus on Leatherface being a transvestite? Leatherface is a side character anyway, it is Vilmer (McConaughey) who is the star. If you don't believe me that he's more the star than Leatherface, count how many people Leatherface, or anyone else, kills with a chainsaw in the movie (hint: none). Vilmer is the new head of household in the backwoods family, working as a tow-truck driver/reckless murderer and who has the fascinating addition of an electric leg that is operated by remote control. And have I mentioned his fucking robot leg? 

There are two deaths in the film, both of side characters. One is run over with a truck. The other has his neck broken. In a movie titled "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation," one would expect gory murders a plenty--though that is far from reality in this case. There is no blood, no guts, and no chainsaw killings. The Leatherface character does absolutely nothing in the film. Excuse me. He does do something. He dresses up like a woman and shrieks his chainsaw above his head while screaming wildly.

Bridget Jones has fucked up here

And what's with the ending? The man and the woman in the trailer have a different person dubbing their voices for them? Why? And what about the airplane flying around and then suddenly hitting a character in the head and oil comes out of their brain? What? There's also some rubbish about the Illuminati, but I won't even bother going into that.

The whole thing works better as a kind of demented screwball comedy, rather than a true horror film. If you have enough beers, this MIGHT be good for a few laughs, but it would take quite a few beers.

Just a normal family dinner

Trivia:

When asked about this movie, Renée Zellweger said, "It was dangerous. I don't know if any of it was legal. It was a great workout. Running from a guy with a live chainsaw is excellent motivation. It was a lot of fun. It was my first role, really. I couldn't believe that somebody was going to trust me with that, that somebody was going to take this chance (on me). I was really grateful. I have no shame about that (movie)."

Despite the title, absolutely zero people are massacred via a chainsaw.

Renée Zellweger reflected on this movie in a 2016 interview, and said: "It was very low budget, so we all shared a tiny Winnebago that the producer of the film--it belonged to him, it was his personal camper. So, you know, make-up was in the front seats and there was a table in the middle for hair, and there was a tiny little curtain by the bathroom. That was where you put your prom dress and your flower on. It was ridiculous. How we pulled that off, I have no idea. I'm sure none of it was legal. Anything we did was a little bit dangerous But what an experience. It was kamikaze filmmaking."

Don't you dare use my name in the promotion of this movie

Matthew McConaughey had just graduated college and planned on moving to California when he auditioned for this movie. He read for the part of a young motorcyclist who rescues Jenny at the end and rides off with her into the sunset (a role that was eventually eliminated). Before he left, writer / producer / director Kim Henkel asked if he knew of anyone who might be right for the role of the villain, Vilmer. McConaughey suggested two friends from acting class and left. He was about to get in his truck and drive to California when he stopped and realized, "What was I thinking?" He immediately turned around and asked Henkel, "Hey, can I audition for Vilmer?" Henkel gave him a spoon from the kitchen, told him to pretend it's a knife and tasked him with scaring his secretary. Then, in the middle of the audition, he told him to pretend his mechanical leg was malfunctioning. McConaughey was so convincing that he won the role of Vilmer on the spot.

Matthew McConaughey (Vilmer) and Renée Zellweger (Jenny) came to fame two years later, with A Time to Kill (1996) and Jerry Maguire (1996), respectively. Both shared the same talent agency. When Sony, which owned this movie's distribution rights, was preparing to re-release it, , highlighting the pair, their agent threatened a lawsuit against the studio, claiming their clients were being unfairly exploited. The agency also said that if Sony released this movie on the backs of their names, neither would appear in any future Sony releases. The film was eventually given a brief, limited theatrical release in September 1997.

The hospital scene at the end featured two actors and one actress from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). John Dugan, who played Grandfather in "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre", is the cop. Paul A. Partain, who played Franklin Hardesty in "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre", is the orderly. Marilyn Burns, who played Sally Hardesty in "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre", is the patient on the gurney (credited as "Anonymous").

Matthew McConaughey says his Dazed and Confused (1993) catchphrase, "All right, all right, all right" in this movie.

Intended by writer /producer / director Kim Henkel to be the "real" sequel to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). The characters of Vilmer and W.E. were intended to be the Hitchhiker and Cook characters from "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre". Jim Siedow was approached to reprise his role as Cook, but was unable to.

This was filmed on-location at an abandoned farmhouse in Pflugerville, Texas and nearby Bastrop. The majority of the cast and crew were locals from Austin, aside from David Gale, a stage actor from Houston. Most of the filming took place at night, and was described by Make-up Artist J.M. Logan as "very, very rough for everyone."

My brother here is tired of what's-her-name's face, and he wants a new one. It just so happens to be, he wants this face right here!

This movie is recursive in that it opens with an intertitle referring to two "minor, yet apparently related incidents," a joking acknowledgment of the previous two sequels. Justin Yandell of "Bloody Disgusting" interprets this movie as a cynical re-imagining of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), with Henkel parodying his own work. He cites Leatherface's ineffectiveness at dispatching his victims, as well as the archetypal teenage characters as evidence of this movie being a commentary on the declining state of horror movies in the late 1980s and early 1990s: Leatherface, once efficient, methodical, and nearly silent, now struggles to competently capture or kill his victims, all the while screaming like a petulant child. The family, no longer backwater cannibals, dines on pizza instead of the fresh meat of their victims. The dinner sequence, originally one of the most effective and horrifying scenes ever committed to film, goes so far off the rails, it climaxes with Jenny turning the tables on her captors and scolding Leatherface into sitting down and shutting up. The ineffectiveness of it all of this is intentional, and we know this because a man in a limo pulls up and openly acknowledges it.

When W.E. comes in with the sawed door, he bickers at Vilmer and Darla, saying, "Look what your brother did to this door." This line is very similar to what Drayton says to the Hitchhiker in [ The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974),] when they came home with Sally. Drayton, upon seeing the sawed door, shouts "Look what your brother did to the door!"

Bill Johnson, who played Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986), was offered the role of Leatherface.

Writer, Producer, and Director Kim Henkel said the characters were purposefully written as cartoonish caricatures of American teenagers in the time this movie was made.

I'm just a sweet transvestite, from Transsexual, Transylvania.

[ at about 1 hr, 4 min. ] Darla (Tonie Perensky) is wearing a sleeveless dress. When Vilmer throws Darla on the top of a table that has mechanical stuff and junk on it, and gets on top of her, in real life she got slightly injured. Tonie got a cut below her left elbow, and there is a patch of blood a few inches long. But Tonie finished filming the scene anyway. Tonie is a real trooper.

Has been noted for its implementation of a secret society subplot driving Leatherface's family to terrorize people in order to provoke them to a level of transcendence. In a retrospective interview, writer / producer / director Kim Henkel confirmed that the basis of the subplot was influenced by theories surrounding the Illuminati. Commenting on this movie's ominous Rothman character, Henkel stated, "He comes off more like the leader of some harum-scarum cult that makes a practice of bringing victims to experience horror on the pretext that it produces some sort of transcendent experience. Of course, it does produce a transcendent experience. Death is like that. But no good comes of it. You're tortured and tormented, and get the crap scared out of you, and then you die." Other references to the Illuminati are made in this movie's dialogue, specifically in the scene in which Darla tells Jenny about the thousands-years-old secret society in control of the U.S. government, and makes reference to the President John F. Kennedy assassination. Critic Russell Smith noted in discussion of this plot point: "Could the unexplained 'them' be an allusion to the insatiable horror audience that always makes these gorefests a good investment, or is it a cabal of governmental powermongers?"

In a 1996-released documentary on the making of this movie, Kim Henkel stated that he wrote the characters as exaggerated "cartoonish" caricatures of quintessential American youth. Henkel cited the murder cases of serial killers Ed Gein and Elmer Wayne Henley as influences on his involvement on this movie and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Henkel also deliberately wrote themes of female empowerment into the script, specifically in the Jenny character: "It's her story. It's about her transformation, her refusal to shut up, to be silenced, to be victimized. And by extension her refusal to be oppressed. Even by culture. Bringing Jenny into a world in which the culture was grotesquely exaggerated was a way of bringing her to see her own world more clearly that is to say, my intent was to present a nightmarish version of Jenny's world in the form of the Chainsaw family in order to enlarge her view of her own world."

Well, first, I'm gonna kill you. It ain't no fuckin biggie.

Another element noted by critics and movie scholars is this movie's overt references to cross-dressing in the Leatherface character, which was briefly explored in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), but implemented to a greater extent. Robert Wilonsky of the Houston Press commented on this movie's treatment of the character, writing that this movie "turns Leatherface (Robert Jacks) into a cross-dressing nancy boy who screams more than he saws." According to Robert Jacks, he wrote the character as one who assumes the persona of the person whose face he wears: "The confused sexuality of the Leatherface character is complex and horrifying at the same time", he said in a 1996 interview. Movie scholar Scott Von Doviak also took note of this, likening Leatherface's presentation in this movie to that of a "tortured drag Queen."

In developing this movie, Executive Producer Robert Kuhn stated: "I wanted to go back to the original, and he (Kim Henkel) did, too. We agreed on that right off. And the first major thing was getting him to write the script. I raised the money to get it written, and for us to start trying to put this thing together. Then we went out to the American Film Market in Los Angeles and talked to a bunch of people about financing. At that point, I'd raised some money, but not nearly enough to make the film, and we looked at the possibilities of making a deal with a distributor. But I knew there wasn't any hope of us making one we could live with. There never is. Kim would say, 'Hey, so-and-so is interested, and it might be a deal we can live with.' So we'd talk to 'em and I'd ask three or four hard questions, and I'd just kind of look over at Kim and he'd say 'Yeah.' Then I'd go back and start trying to raise some more money. I just started going to everybody I knew and I got it in bits and pieces, wherever I could."

The chainsaw is a McCulloch PRO MAC 700. A 70.5cc saw.

Matthew McConaughey originally auditioned for a hero role that was later cut, then recommended a couple of friends for the role before auditioning himself.

Near the end of Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990), Ken Foree asks Viggo Mortensen why they are doing this. Viggo says because they are hungry. Ken asks Viggo if he ever heard of pizza. In this movie, Tonie Perensky is shown bringing pizza home for the family.