Harefooted Halloween: Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation

What I Liked: Not a goddamn thing.

What I Didn’t Liked: Every goddamn thing

Overall Impressions: This is way worse than I remembered.  I mean I didn’t like it the one other time I saw it a long way back but holy shit is this kinda unbearable.  It’s completely incoherent.  The dialogue, shifts in tone, mashups of tone, acting, horrendous character development, story ideas that don’t make sense or fit within the franchise, etc, it’s all so fucking awful.  At least on a technical level it’s shot and edited mostly fine.  You know who is where and stuff…well…that is until someone starts speaking then it just turns into gibberish again.

The movie is semi-famous for starring Renee Zellweger (Appaloosa) and Matthew McConaughey (Killer Joe) very early in their careers.  Zellweger actually does alright but there are a couple of times when she can barely muster the shitty lines she’s supposed to say and does the minimal amount of work to get through the scene.  McConaughey meanwhile goes too far over the top with the madman routine.  He’s downright zany, cartoonish and incomprehensible.  It becomes annoying almost instantly how hard he pushes the craziness in every scene.

Then there’s this guy in a suit who rides around in a limo who’s commissioning the murders for no reason that’s explained.  He’s got markings and piercings on his chest that aren’t explained either.  And McConaughey has an unwieldly mechanical contraption on his leg that he needs to walk and he controls it with multiple TV/VCR remotes and he likes to cut himself with a knife and the hard rock soundtrack goes in and out at weird times and one of the other bad guys likes to spout these sophisticated sounding quotes from historic figures and later Grandpa who looks like he might be dead opens his eyes, gets up and leaves the movie mid-scene and guys, I don’t know what the fuck is happening.

This feels more like a terrible Texas Chainsaw knock off than a legitimate sequel in the series.  It’s also too irritating to be an enjoyably bad film so there’s no redemption there.  Just don’t watch it.  Please.