[3]

Kim Henkel, co-creator of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, writes and directs this fourth film in the series, about a car of high school prom attendees who get stranded near the infamous Sawyer family’s house and get picked off one by one when they split up to find help. The most interesting thing about this flick is that it features early performances from future Oscar winners Renee Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey. McConaughey may be put to good use as the manic head of the Sawyer household, but Zellweger is laughable and ineffective trying to be a movie ‘scream queen’ — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg with what’s wrong with this movie.

From a script perspective, Henkel is trying too hard to remake the original film. Several iconic moments are recaptured less effectively than before, including an iconic moment from the first sequel. (If I were Tobe Hooper, director of the first two Chain Saw movies, I’d have taken Henkel off my Christmas card list for these infractions.) Henkel also shows no knack for tension or suspense. Every opportunity he has to build some, he ruins it with a joke, a bad edit, or an odd, abrupt ending to a scene. Sometimes it feels as though footage is missing from this movie and the editors just did the best they could with what they had. The rhythm is wildly off. The film wants so badly to emulate the ever-ratcheting tension of the original classic film, following so closely to its story and structure, that its shortcomings become all the more glaring.

The Sawyer family simply doesn’t work in this movie. They’re don’t feel like they could possibly be real, and none of them are grounded in any kind of reality, however dark or demented. McConaughey’s character is always in over-the-top whackadoo mode and the only explanation we ever get for his behavior is an indication that he works for the Illuminati? His girlfriend is a joke-character whose motivations change to meet the screenplays needs and there’s a third character whose neither funny nor threatening — a guy who just recites passages from literature all the time. Leatherface is still there, and he’s a somewhat interesting character — still wearing different people’s skins and trying out different personalities to match. It’s interesting to see him spend so much of this film as a young woman (complete with breasts and lipstick). But poor Leatherface seems very out of place with this newer, younger, more hip, and less effective family.

In addition to the family not working, neither does the leading lady. Zellweger’s character is so horribly written and performed, it may be the biggest crime of all. She experienes great trauma one moment, then shrugs it off entirely the next. She goes from screaming and crying at the hands of McConaughey to yelling commands and trying to threaten him. I suspect a lot of the performance is marred by writing and editing, but however you slice it, Zellweger’s gotta be ashamed of this one.

In the final act, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation takes its unoriginality and poor execution and ups the ante by adding confounding existentialism to the mix. You could say the movie shows glints of future self-reflective horror films like The Final Nightmare or Cabin in the Woods. But like the rest of the film, this component is sloppily handled and only serves as a final, open-ended aggravation to the viewer.