The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre aka Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995)

(In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) Nearly every actor has a few regrets in the hungry days of their filmography, and some movies benefit from being those regrets—raising their profile far above what they would have been without those subsequently big-name actors. The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre had no less than two of them, enough so that it would, within two years, be re-edited, retitled and re-released as Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation to capitalize on the sudden stardom of Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger. Nothing but regional luck explains this dual pairing: The film was a low-production affair that scoured the Austin acting scene to find its actors, and both were newcomers looking for any kind of work. Zellweger does look cute in glasses as a young woman preyed upon by a family of killers on Texas backwoods roads. McConaughey plays against type as a younger member of that family that also includes include a deceptively normal-looking realtor as bait (the attractive Tonie Perensky). What could have been just a forgettable and generic plot soon turns bizarre (and worse) when the usual teenager-versus-hillbilly-psychos dynamic somehow comes to include links to a secret society (???) involved in the JFK assassination (!!!) as represented by a snappily dressed man in a limousine (?!!) who just drops by the house to have a look around (??!) Even the legacy of the Texas Chainsaw series (and I use the expression lightly, not being a fan of it) is severely undermined by Leatherface being an incredibly inept opponent reduced to being in drag and screaming helplessly. Thankfully, this family eats pizza rather than humans, but that’s just one more thing that comes to confound those expecting a continuation to the series. I, personally, don’t care about the Texas Chainsaw premise at all, so I’m enjoying a reaction to the film similar to that of Halloween III—the more they desecrate the series’ mythos, the more I’m enjoying the put-down. Still, subverting expectations isn’t a virtue by itself, and much of Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation is just tedious. Occasionally interesting for watching McConaughey and baby-faced Zellweger in such schlock, intermittently intriguing for undermining the entire series, but otherwise not really worth the effort.