"Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation" - Zach's Take

You know how at the end of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre Leatherface twirls around aimlessly, awkwardly flinging the chainsaw around at the air, almost doing a weird little kooky dance?

That always soured the film for me. I thought it was over-the-top and silly. It kind of took me out of the film and ruined the verisimilitude that the it had managed to create up until that point.

Now imagine that last shot, but extended for 90-minutes.

Writer/director Kim Henkel (who wrote the original) returns to offer up what he calls "the real sequel" to the first one. Which is interesting, considering this is essentially a re-tread of the original, with pretty much nothing interesting to add and certainly no new take on the material. Teenagers get stranded. Leatherface knocks out one of them, hangs up the other on a meat hook, and chases the final girl with a chainsaw for a little bit. Then the main girl gets caught and is forced to endure a psycho family dinner. Girl escapes, chased by Leatherface. Cue kooky dance. Roll credits.

Just about the only difference is that the teenagers get stranded in the woods (which look nothing like Texas) instead of the remote and desolate plains like in the first film. The new scenery takes any of the creepiness out of the proceedings; how many horror flicks have you seen set in the woods? Probably a little less than fifteen million.

Ultimately, this film feels like some failed art-house director's take on the original. There's a lot of intentional ambiguity, hammy over-acting posing as social criticism, and a scarcity of any sense of pacing or tension. Shots linger for far too long and expose the silliness of the events unfolding on screen. The tone is far too preposterous to be scary, and far too deranged and "edgy" to be campy.

Take, for example, the cameo that ties this film to the original: at the end, Renee Zelwegger's character sees a girl being hauled off on a gurney. The role is credited to "Anonymous." It's actually Marilyn Burns who played Sally in the original film. Or also consider that Leatherface is portrayed as having some kind of gender identity disorder. The film is full of these lame and half-baked "twists" on the original. Deep, man. Deep.

To sum up: the film aims to have it all, swinging awkwardly from campy to serious and everywhere in between.

In other words, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation is the weird little kooky dance of horror cinema.