The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1995)

The fourth entry in the Texas Chainsaw cycle arrives with a curious pedigree. Kim Henkel, who wrote the 1974 original, took the director's chair for this 1995 prom-night outing, shot on a modest budget in and around Pflugerville with a largely Austin-based cast. Among the players were a then-unknown Renee Zellweger and a then-unknown Matthew McConaughey, both of whom would go on to better things. The film's ambitions are modest and its cultural footprint smaller still. It is a slasher picture about teenagers wandering into a farmhouse, and it makes no effort to address the demographics of its audience, the climate, or the economy. The cast is uniformly white, which is a fact of the production, not a statement of any kind.

There is one faint signal worth recording. Henkel has said he wrote Jenny as a figure of female empowerment, a young woman who refuses to be silenced or victimized and emerges self-realized. That intent registers, barely, in the final act, where she fights her way out of the dinner table and into a limousine. The machinery surrounding her is pure exploitation: meat hooks, sledgehammers, a corpse in the bathtub. The empowerment is asserted in interviews more than dramatized on screen, and it never hardens into a sermon. A viewer hoping to be lectured will leave disappointed.

The rest of the checklist yields nothing. The secret society that employs the killers gestures at elite manipulation, but it is a plot device about spiritual torment, not an economic critique. Race, climate, body image, neurodivergence: none of it appears, and none of it is asked for. It remains a strange, sweaty cult object, memorable chiefly for McConaughey's audition and its own incoherence.