“It was kamikaze filmmaking”: the 1995 movie Renée Zellweger is convinced was shot illegally
Anyone excited by what the young director Curry Barker has managed with the staggering Obsession will no doubt be chomping at the bit about the news that he’s going to be reimagining The Texas Chain Saw Massacre via A24, and will surely do a better job than the forgotten 1995 effort with Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger.
Because that film, officially titled The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but then inexplicably renamed Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, making it sound more like a teenage dance-based TV show than a gory slasher, was not good at all.
It was the fourth film in the franchise that kicked off in far better fashion all the way back in 1974, with director Tobe Hooper’s original becoming a landmark in horror and influencing almost every movie in the genre for the next 50 years. Neither of the next two films was worthy of the name, though, with 1990’s Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III proving a particularly low point.
However, five years later, Zellweger’s movie retelling the well-trodden story of some teenagers heading into the deep woods of Texas (why!!) and running into the psychotically violent Leatherface, each of them managing to get violently dispatched off in all manner of increasingly gruesome ways, somehow managed to outdo the third instalment.
Despite the writer of the original returning to pen the script more than 20 years later, the film was bogged down in legal disputes and disastrous test screenings, and in the end, it wasn’t released until 1997, bringing in a frankly pathetic $180k at the box office. Between making the movie and its eventual release, Zellweger’s presence in Hollywood increased dramatically, thanks to a role in Tom Cruise’s hit Jerry Maguire, but she still looked back on the shambolic experience with some excitement.
She told Yahoo Movies, “I was so grateful, and I was so excited. I had done a little bit here, a little bit there, but nobody had ever trusted me with a role before to carry a film. We all shared a tiny Winnebago that belonged to the producer of the film.”
Describing running from a live chainsaw as “the best workout ever”, Zellweger seemed totally unfazed by a production process that was described as rough on everyone involved, filming taking place mostly at night, in stifling heat and humidity, surrounded by poison ivy and old animal carcasses. She added, “It was ridiculous. How we pulled that off, I have no idea. I’m sure none of it was legal… But what an experience. It was kamikaze filmmaking.”
Critics were less than kind about the movie when it finally came out, calling it cheap and convoluted, and it currently holds a 15% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but it didn’t do Zellweger, or McConaughey for that matter, any harm, with both actors becoming household names toward the end of the 1990s.
Zellweger went on to be a double-Oscar winning star, and last year had another huge box office hit with Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the fourth film in the series that saw her team up with Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Backrooms’ Chiwetel Ejiofor and Leo Woodall, who is currently starring in Tuner with Dustin Hoffman, and you should watch that film it as soon as possible, because it’s brilliant.
