There's a lot I could blog about. There are a lot of things I could talk about. There are a lot of movies I could talk about. But I'm going to talk about Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation.
Directed by Kim Henkel. Less importantly starring Mathew McCounahay who gets to be in the scariest role you will ever see him in, Rene Zellwegger in a strange role and a few other B actors. More importantly Kim Henkel was the co-writer for the original 1974 Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
So it came on, and as there is little to watch on a Saturday night, I figured a bad horror movie could always be fun. Usually I give a movie I forsee as going to be "bad" about 15 minutes to see if theres some hook. It doesn't have to be a good one, just some reason not to change the channel to Sportscenter repeats, just some reason why this movie was made.
It starts off very on the nose and boring and 70s, but it was made in '94 so there had to be some reason? Was it motif or just bad film making? I dunno, kept watching 10 minutes in. Still very scripted, but it's getting more obvious. Maybe it will be campy? 94 wasn't really into campy horror though, the late 80s and early 90s were much more about sequels and serialized horror. The Jasons, Freddys, Hellraisers, were all sequelized in the 90s. So this remake could just as easily be...really bad horror...and then there's this turn.
There had been one jump scare so far, the rest was all ambiance fear, setting mood and what not. A female character, the dumb prom queen one, waits in the front of the creepy house while her boyfriend, the obnoxious jock, goes around the back. In frame is simply the girl on a porch bench and then slowly, with no jump, a large figure enters the frame. He moves his way over, but is too tall for the screen. We can only see him from the waist down, so we know he's huge. And he just stands behind her. He very slowly waves at her hair with a few fingers. She bats it away. Again. A few times. Then it just cuts away. Nice, light, simple. This was not a 90s movie.
From there it makes a lot of really interesting choices in terms of horror and gore, who gets killed, how, how someone escapes and all that. McConaughey plays an incredibly creepy sadistic lunatic with a robotic leg, for some reason. The interesting choice made here is what they did with McConaughey and the other villains. Our heroes were stereotyped action figures. There was the heroine who was shy and quiet and everyone made fun of her, there was the prom queen who was really wishing to be more free, the jock who didn't fear anything, and the geeky guy who got to die. None of them had any sort of backstory. Usually what horror tries to do is bury you in the hero's life so you feel apart of it, so when it gets scared, you get scared. This movie does the exact opposite. It humanizes the villains...to a degree. It's not a horror movie like Seven which is based in realism, the world in this movie is still cartoonish, as most horror. But this time the horror isn't the cartoon, the heroes are.
The purpose for this becomes incredibly clear near the end, when a mysterious black car drives up to the house. A french man gets out, walks in, and tries to calm down Rene Zellwegger. Then he berates and beats McConaughey for "not being scary enough." It's vague and ridiculous, but not absurd. He tells McConaughey to really scare her, he wants her to know what real fear is, and that he is just being a "silly boy." Then he leaves. Then there's a brutal killing, which I'll spare the details for the weaker of the readers, but trust me, it was pretty cruel. Then there's a big chase scene, Rene gets out and eventually McConaughey dies, in a ridiculous fashion. And Leatherface, remember, this is a Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie, as a complete cross dresser (which he always was, but by the end of the movie is in full on wacky attire). After McConaughey dies, the black car is there, and Rene gets in to have a final conversation with the French guy. He explains that his intent was to really scare people into having a spiritual experience. That he really tried to scare people for good. And that now, the people he hires are so far out of whack and so far gone with gore and needless violence that they have forgotten what they were supposed to do in the first place.
I don't know if Henkel was trying to say anything about the horror industry or not. I don't know if he was calling out everyone who sold out and made a copy of a movie that hurt a genre that was finally making progress. I don't know if Henkel was just bitter that what he tried to create spawned awful sequels (one of which stars Viggo Mortenson, I gotta find that one) that ultimately set horror back at least 10-20 years. I don't know Kim Henkel. I do like his movies though.
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