Well, that’s how the actors in this movie are, including Renee Zellweger. You know how in high school your English class would have days where everyone had to take turns reading passages from a Shakespeare play or something out-loud, one kid at a time? Remember how the students would parrot their lines as quickly and unenthusiastically as possible just to get them over with, almost resenting that they had to do it in the first place? The problem, then, is that all the actors are absolutely terrible even by straight-to-video ‘90s horror standards. I imagine if one were to read this in script form or as a novelization or, I dunno, a comic book adaptation, they probably wouldn’t think twice about it as being particularly dreadful. The film actually follows pretty much all the basics of a typical Texas Chainsaw Massacre installment, with characters getting abducted by the Sawyers, tormented, stuck on meat hooks, shoved in freezers, forced to endure whacko dinner scenes and the like, all decorated with a menagerie of scenery-chewing hillbillies burdened with excesses of personality. I don’t care anymore.īeing conceived as a remake, The Next Generation follows much of the same flow as the original 1974 film, right down to aping the entire chainsaw chase sequence through the woods, house, second floor window and ending at a rest station where the fleeting female thought she’d find help (only to find a member of the family). And Leatherface’s handicap in the third film was a reference to his impalement at the end of the second film, but he suffers no such physical malady in this installment. Of course, just to prove that The Next Generation can’t do anything completely right, its opening narrative scrawl alludes to the events of both Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Leatherface as “two minor, yet apparently related incidents”, thus implying it takes place after the third film. And barring all those other things, Grandpa (Grayson Victor Schirmacher) is alive in this movie and dead in Leatherface, so it’d have to take place in-between the second and third films, anyway. It also ends with Sally Hardesty (played once more by Marilyn Burns in a cameo), still in her coma, being wheeled out of a hospital by a member of the global fear syndicate, presumably to meet her doom. Sawyer, who survives the end of the film so that he can be arrested before Leatherface. The Next Generation, fitting in-between the second and third movie, introduces us to the enigmatic (and completely worthless) W.E. Sawyer”… a character who was never in any of the previous movies. Leatherface opens with a scrawl claiming that Sally Hardesty died and that the only Sawyer to ever be arrested and executed was a “W.E. Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 says that Sally Hardesty fell into a coma and the Sawyers were never arrested. To put on my nerd cap, the narrative discontinuity between the second and third films in the series has mostly to do with the opening narrative scrawls of those films. Yeah, he got the job done, but do the ends justify the means? In the case of The Next Generation, I would say “No”. Try to imagine hiring a teenager to mow your lawn but in the process he splatters mud all over your house and breaks your windows with rocks. Unfortunately, it serves a narrative purpose while simultaneously being an absolute wreck to sit through. In that respect, The Next Generation actually repairs the discontinuity between the last two sequels which is about the only thing of merit the film accomplishes. Originally titled The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and intended to be a remake of the original film, celebrating its 20th anniversary, writer/Director Kim Henkel inadvertently ended up creating an “in-betweenquel” that fits snugly between The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III. As the sadistic Sawyers take Jenny hostage for a night of fun and games, the mousey youth learns the truth behind their devilish antics: they belong to an ancient Illuminati society of global fear agents intent on spreading horror as a form of spiritual experience. Sawyer (Joe Stevens), transvestite Leatherface (Robert Jacks) and Vilmer’s white trash girlfriend, Darla (Tonie Perensky). Jenny’s friends are quickly murdered by the brutal Sawyer family: Cyborg-legged Vilmer Sawyer (Matthew McConaughey), idiot-savant W.E. Unfortunately, some ill-conceived drama sends them down the backroads of Texas and you know what that means. Its prom night and Jenny (Renee Zellweger) and her friends just want to enjoy the teenage redneck event like everyone else. Listen to the latest episode of the AIPT Movies Podcast!
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