THE RETURN OF THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (Henkel, 1994)

This writer viewed the film with my buddy, Phil, who had heard about it on the TCM e! TRUE HOLLYWOOD STORY. I'd had my copy for around a year now and wanted to finally get around to watching it. I'd read a lot about the sequel (which is, really, more of a remake), some good, some bad. But absolutely nothing could've prepared me for what followed. TCM4 is an absolute clusterfuck of a film, filled with some of the most inane dialogue delivered by some of the worst actors ever in a horror film. That's saying something, too. Several of the performances are so wooden and stilted that I had to believe they were purposefully terrible.

Henkel is a good writer, I think, but this thing was just a mess. He tries to link together conspiracy theories into the CHAIN SAW legacy, and it just ends up falling flat on its own face. McConaughey was just so over the top as to be unbelievable, and I hate Zelweger, so there wasn't much here to enjoy. A lot of reviews I've read on IMDb focus on Leatherface's cross-dressing, but they seem to forget that he's dressed like a woman in the original, too.

Is this a spoof? It's not smart enough to be considered satire. Henkel tries to link together literary references and governmental conspiracies, but ultimately, it's incoherent and absurd. Not that these are necessarily bad things, but you get the sense they weren't intended to turn out that way. I've read the film is a victim of editing, so I'll reserve total judgement. I will say that there are laughs to be had from the film; they're just not intentional. Unless they were.