anxieties | the m0vie blog

“This Was Supposed to Be a Spiritual Experience”: The Mid-Nineties Ennui of “Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation”…

Posted on June 25, 2019 by Darren

This Saturday, I’ll be discussing Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation on The 250, the weekly podcast that I co-host discussing the IMDb’s Top 250 Movies of All-Time. However, I had some thoughts on the film that I wanted to jot down first.

I’ve never been able to watch it with any kind of perspective. To me it just looks like some crude backyard movie a bunch of kids slapped together. There seems to me to be, on one hand, a group of people who were strictly horror fans who venerated it. Only over time has it come to occupy a very peculiar position, and I still don’t have any concept of what that is. I think we just wanted to hang a bunch of people on meat hooks, chop ’em up, and sell tickets at the theatre.

– Kim Henkel discusses The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation is a very nineties film, speaking to a very unique set of nineties anxieties.

There is something very revealing and candid about certain kinds of bad movies. Of course, many bad movies are just bad, hacky executions of well-worn concepts without any insight or skill to anchor them. However, there are some bad movies that seem driven by a strange source of passion and energy, which makes them bizarre snapshots of a particular time and place. It is almost a sort of candour, an unguarded bluntness, that allows them to articulate their perspective without any of the consideration or care of a better film.

The Next Generation is one of those films. It is, to be entirely clear, a terrible film. It is sloppily constructed. It is terribly framed. It is incoherently plotted. Its characters are drawn in the crudest of terms. Most damningly, it combines two particularly awful subgenres of the “bad movie” archetype. It is both a horror movie that is not scary and a black comedy that is not funny. It is, by all accounts, a disaster. Watching the film, the question isn’t how the release was delayed for three years. Instead, the question becomes how the film was ever released at all.

However, whether in spite of because of all of this, The Next Generation feels like a weird snapshot of a particular mid-nineties mood. Somehow, while groping around in the darkness, it accidentally puts its finger on the pulse.

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Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: anxieties, conspiracy theories, ennui, fears, feminism, gender roles, globalisation, kim henkel, masculinity, nineties, performativity, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, texas chainsaw massacre: the next generation | Leave a comment »

Millennium – Antipas (Review)

Posted on July 21, 2015 by Darren

This July, we’re taking a trip back in time to review the sixth season of The X-Files and the third (and final) season of Millennium.

Antipas is the second of three scripts written by Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz over the third season of Millennium. It is also the first of Lucy Butler’s two appearances during the third season, although she has little more than a cameo in Saturn Dreaming of Mercury. This is actually the second time that Chris Carter has written for the character of Lucy Butler, having scripted her début back in Lamentation towards the end of the first season. Antipas feels like a conscious effort to connect back to that first appearance.

To be fair, Lucy Butler has been radically different in each appearance. It is difficult to get a read on the character or to suggest a “definitive” take. Finding the “real” Lucy Butler is as difficult as identifying the “real” Millennium Group or as arbitrary as naming the “real” version of Millennium. That said, there are thematic throughlines. Four of her five appearances are tied into children, for example; the show fairly consistently portrays Lucy as a demonic mother figure in contrast to Frank as a loving father.

Here’s Lucy!

While the idea of Lucy as a creepy mother ties Antipas into A Room With No View just as much as Lamentation, the script seems to hark more firmly back to Lucy’s character motivation in Lamentation than to her scheming in A Room With No View. In Antipas, Lucy is once again obsessed with biological motherhood, trying desperately to conceive – and even to claim another child as her own. In Lamentation, she sought to mother a child with Doctor Ephraim Fabricant; in Antipas, she seems to aspire towards Frank Black.

Along the way, Antipas is packed with fevered dream imagery and uncanny visuals. As with a lot of the episodes around it, Antipas feels like a very odd piece of television. When Carter wrote Lamentation, this oddness was enough of a break from the norm to power an entire episode. Antipas lacks the sort of strong centre that a piece of television like this needs to ground it. The result is an intriguing and unsettling, if not quite compelling and engrossing, episode of television.