Wrong! Well, at least this movie bore the next generation of movie stars? Yeah, let’s go with that.
I should like this movie. A lot. It has everything I love: dumb teenagers after prom, unnecessary blood spatter, and just all around ridiculousness. But alas, this film in pushing cliche to it’s limit, overshot and then wallowed in it rather than draw back into acceptable range.
Look, I know it’s hard to be a teenager, and after prom holds so much potential for things that you want to do and don’t want to do. But that is no excuse to turn into a fucking moron. Yes, bad ass nerdy girls are cool. Unfortunately, Renée Zellweger is neither. Matthew McConaughey’s Vilmer is the bright spot of this film. Good on him. However, his character’s leg is just... ugh. There are better ways to portray that.
And for the record, I’m ok with cross-dressing Leatherface.
Corey says:
As a disclaimer, this was the first sequel to Texas that I ever watched. I was in my mid-teens, and had finally gotten into horror past the “I’m 10 years old this is scary” stage of my fandom. Thus, when The Next Generation got released at my local video rental shop, I grabbed it sight unseen, lured by the weird sexy (???) Leatherface on the cover. Thus, my memories of this film were colored by a time where any horror was good horror. I was a sponge, and they’ll suck up the bad with the good with no regard for either.
This recent viewing reaffirmed that, yeah, there actually is some good stuff going on here. First of all, the family that got put together this time around does alright. They seem like a loving family with a good streak of wacko put in for good measure. Leatherface has some really good looks this time around, and generally acted like the big slow guy we all know and love. The hijinks with the bionic leg that Matthew McConaughey wears are hilarious, and the banter/fighting between family members is reminiscent of the first two films. Also, there’s no fucking kid to fuck things up. Fucking kids.
This time, though, all of those bits that I could happily gloss over in reverie were there in all of their ugly glory. Like the scene where Darla TOTALLY shows her ACTUAL TITS and not a body double’s during the scene where she flashes people for no good reason. Hell, I was 16, I didn’t care, tits were tits. This time, though, the transition from Darla to boobs is so jarring that it looked like they lifted the boobs from a different film entirely. Really, if they wanted that flashing sequence so bad, why not just get Linnea Quigley? She’ll get naked for a ham sandwich and a tube of Ben Gay.
And then there’s the weird freaky government dude. At 16, I thought that was edgy and neat. Crazy weird piercing through a ridiculous part of your body? Neato! You killed a dude with an airplane? Fucking AWESOME!
At 32, I think it’s dumb as shit.
Salty says:
I am certain that the idea behind Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation was this: what if there was a reason behind the Sawyer family? What could that reason be? To find the answer you have to ask what is the true reason for all evil in the world according to a Texan. The answer is, of course, the government. Bear with me on this for just a minute, here is your kernel: the government is actually facilitating the Sawyer family’s wholesale slaughter of Real Americans across the great state of Texas. It follows then that each member of the Sawyer family should represent a different “problem” with society.
Think about what are we given. If you were a Texan and you wanted to make a horror satire about the liberal government’s welfare system, what would you want to cover? We have the cripple, surely he is receiving disability for his tender condition (and most Texans are blowing raspberries at that!). Now, the filmmakers have a problem in that the physically disabled aren’t generally considered to be threatening, so they would need to come up with a threatening disability or you could give him a threatening crutch. I may be reaching here, but what kinds of crutches are people leaning on these days? Technology. So we give the leader of the family a gimp leg, enough to get him some subsidized relief, and then we fix it with crappy broken technology. On paper it’s a potent metaphor; in the film it is Matthew Mechagimpleg McConaughey with a nonsensical piston-leg-brace that is overly sensitive to remote controls and allows him to crush people’s skulls with ease.
Mechagimpleg’s got a hussy girlfriend. One of the first things she does when we are introduced to her is flash her boobs at some local college kids for the thrill. She uses her sexuality to get away with her crimes, hence the whole scene where she flirts with the cops to divert their attention from the girl that she has tied up in her trunk. She spends the rest of the movie toggling between being madly in love with her boyfriend and getting into fistfights with him. Face it, she’s just a few years away from having a couple of kids with that same abusive cripple, and those kids aren't going to feed themselves.
Do you doubt that Bubba AKA Leatherface is mentally handicapped? It is an established fact, and though his presence in this film is perhaps the least in the series he maintains an inability to speak or properly communicate, thus in real society he would receive some gub’ment money, and if your from Texas you ain’t lykin’ dat (especially since he’s a transvestite too). Then there’s the third brother: the one who doesn’t do much. Is it too much of a stretch at this point to speculate that he is receiving unemployment? Perhaps he’s a drug addict.
When the men in suits show up we get a couple of speeches about what a bad job Mechagimpleg is doing and we are supposed to think that this man is his employer. In a way he is: he is a government caseworker coming to see what is happening with the money the family has received and he is upset that things are so crazy. Mechagimpleg fears this man, because he needs to appear to be resisting the awful acts that he is committing to keep getting his free money. On the other hand, Mechagimpleg does have an advantage: the government man cannot stop him from torturing and killing the innocent because the federal government does not endorse capital punishment for any crime. It all kind of fits together, don’t you think?
The movie is a conservative view of liberal government and the way it hands out money the weak and needy. Therefore, the Sawyer family is just – are you ready for the linchpin that’s going to sell the whole thing? The Sawyer family is just a group of babies sucking at the government’s tits – hence the government employee is covered with nipples!
You’re welcome.
| Maire | Corey | Salty |
|---|---|---|
| ☆ | ☆☆ | ☆ |
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