McConaughey voice: “Leatherface, you just gotta keep looking for those greenlights…”
A video store staple is the cash-in ‘before they were stars’ release, particularly cheap looking DVDs with a badly photoshopped poster emphasising a big movie star in an early role. The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1995), or as I saw it on video shelves, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, was a fun example of this. You might be lucky to have one future movie star, but this sucker had two! And even if their agents might block attempts to market the movie as a Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger feature film, but they need to relax because they’re are both great here! You clearly see their talent and future stardom in effect, with Zellweger as the protagonist, chased and screaming, yet gets to put their foot down, have some agency in the face of her night in hell. And even if he’s baby-faced, McConaughey is already full-throttle McConaughey (he does say “alright alright alright” and yammers on like a psychotic version of his trademark cosmic cowboy schtick), and it’s great to see him in this dangerous register, obviously a swaggering actor keen to sink their teeth into a greasy, twisted killer.
Directed by Kim Henkel, the co-writer of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this restages what we expect from such a movie with a few welcome twists, finding itself somewhere in between the first and second movies in the franchise. Released in 1995, this was made before Scream’s success and reinvigoration of the horror genre, so it avoids being too postmodern and self-aware, even though there is a meta element here, in how it relates to the original movie. For example, we know there will be a character introduced as a normal member of society who turns out to be secretly related to the chainsaw-wielding, murdering clan, and here it’s Tonie Perensky’s Darla, a brassy real estate agent, which nicely adds a feminine air to what is generally a masculine den of mutants. Then you have Leatherface not just wear one person’s skin as a face mask, but alternating faces, most interestingly cross-dressing as a woman and applying lipstick to a Marlene Dietrech record. Avoiding the gore effects of the second movie, there is still a lot of violence, more in how the clan, especially McConaughey’s Vilmer attack and beat up one another. The most brutal act plays out on a sustained shot of McConaghey’s face rather than showing blood and guts. And then there’s the strange connection made to a wealthy and mysterious illuminati who has oversight on the white trash underclass activities.
More intriguing and strange than the video cover and my intial thoughts about it being a cash-in at the time. While the first act takes its time setting things up, the fourth Texas Chainsaw Massacre does create a sustained pitch of chaos and ugliness, with deviations into a sense of humour befitting a John Waters movie. If the family is ‘Saw, here it’s like a share house of bickering freaks. Keep Austin Weird! Streamed on Tubi (US).
VHS Tracking 