Fangoria Articles
Fangoria Magazine #136, September 1994
"Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre cuts deep"
article by John Wooley
It seems there's no breaking this chain of sequels, and this time one of the original writers is continuing the mayhem...
Sailing down the Texas highway on her way to a rural section of Pflugerville, the night air whooshing through her sunroof of her Volkswagen Jetta, Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre production coordinator Nancy Schafer gives a quick example of just how fast time can zip by: "People are always asking me if I worked on the first Chainsaw." she says with a smile. "I tell them that if I had, I would've been about 5 years old."
Sure enough, it has been over 20 years since director Tobe Hooper, his co-writer Kim Henkel and their raggedy band of pals, college actors and semipro filmmakers pulled together in the oppressive Texas heat to forge an all-time horror heavy-weight. And now, two decades and two sequels later, Henkel is finally getting another crack at the mythos he helped create.
The location for Return is in and around a weatherbeaten two-story house near
Pflugerville, a favorite location for film crews shooting in Texas because
of it's easy access to both country and city. The metal roofed, Victorian
home has seen service in a number of movies, including Willie Nelson's
Red-Headed Stranger and last year's Flesh and Bone. This time around,
it's the dwelling of the latest incarnation of the Chainsaw family, all
whom are now in residence, running through a scene with Henkel, who's both
directing and writing this installment.
One glance inside the house tells plenty. For one thing, it's almost
nostalgic. Production designer Debbie Pastor has obviously hewed closely
to the cluttered, excessive, nasty look that Robert Burns crafted in the
original. In the kitchen, a filthy pile of dishes and other detritus spills
out of the sink, just below a partially dismembered Barred Rock hen. A
bloated bag of cheese puffs floats in a pan on the grimy stove. The
kitchen's center is dominated by a chopping block piled high with keys,
batteries, TV remote controllers, boxes of shotgun shells, and crowning the
mess, a dented can of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee Smurfs pasta.
There's more rubble in the dining room, with pizza boxes and dirty utensils
strewn across the long table. Around it, the actors portaying the family
rehearse a scene in which the female lead, Jenny [Renee Zellweger], is taunted
and tormented by the brutish sadist Vilmer [Matthew McConaughey]. Although the
faces have changed, you can recognize some of the old gang, or at least their
antecedents: Grandpa [Grayson Schirmacher] is back at the table, joined by
Vilmer, who appears to be rooted in Edwin Neal's original Hitchhiker character,
and W.E. [Joe Stevens], a nutty young man who mutters incessantly, much like Jim
Siedow, the first Chainsaw's cook. In addition, there are a couple of new
characters, including the statuesque, brassy Darla [Tony Perensky], Vilmer's
main squeeze.
And then of course there's Leatherface. This time around, he's played by a young
Austin-based actor named Robert Jacks. He's not wearing the Leatherface mask at
the rehearsal, and his face looks shockingly kind of friendly-looking, considering
that he's supposed to be portraying one of the most insane, over-the-top killers
ever commited to celluliod.
Two female victims complete the scene, although one named Heather [Lisa Newmeyer] appears to be fairly dead at this point, lying face down on the table as the others go through histrionics. The other is Jenny, who, as the scene unfolds, shows enough backbone to stand up to Vilmer and the whole family in a profanely defiant way.
Over to the side, Henkel looks on, giving direction and suggestions as the scene begins to jell. Bespectacled, with a walrus mustache, Henkel projects a quietly intense, almost professioral air, and has nothing but praise for his performers. "We've been extraordinarily fortunate in getting the cast we have," he says. "People tell you it's not difficult to find talent that's non-SAG, but everybody has to come from some place, and I believe a number of these people are going to have extraordinary careers. Matthew McConaughey, who plays Vilmer, is also in [Austin director Richard Linklater's] Dazed and Confused. Renee Zellweger is extraordinary, and some of the supporting people are incredible. Darla is a wonderful little role for Toni Perensky. And there's something special about the other three teenagers, although, depending on when they are killed, their parts are relatively small. But you do get to know them."
Except for Houston stage actor James Gale, playing a character named Rothman, all of the cast comes from Austin, a few miles down the highway from Pflugerville. The actors' Austin origins and most of the crew provide another link with the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre as do cameo shots from Paul Partain [Chainsaw's wheelchair-bound Franklin] and John Dugan [the original Grandpa]. And, although Henkel is coy about it, rumor has it that the first Chainsaw's heroine, Marilyn Burns, shows up near the end of Return. If you want to stretch things a little, you could make a case for a fourth cast returnee too - director of photography Levie Isaacks, whose resume includes Sundown, Leprechaun and Hooper's Spontaneous Combustion, also appeared in Chainsaw. Sort of. "I've known Levie for over 20 years, since he was a newsman in Austin," notes the director. "When you hear radio broadcasts in the original, he's the voice of some of them.
Levie's a terrific cinematographer, and it's only because we've been friends for a long time that I could twist his arm and drag him back from LA for this," Henkel adds. "It's been a blessing; I would've been lost without him. The first film, of course, was 16mm blown up, and it had that grainy, gritty quality and very little in the way of production values. Here, although I think that underlying grittiness is still there, the production values are on an altogether different level. You could pay $60 million and not get better footage."
After running through the scene a few times, as blocking is worked out and lines are cut and added, Henkel sends the actors up to the second floor of the old house, where special FX director J.M. Logan and his assistant Andy Cockrum wait. Like virtually all the rest of the cast and crew, Logan is from nearby Austin, where he's worked in both theater and film. For a time, he ran a special FX company called Art of Illusion, which crafted various FX for local businesses. Most recently, he created special makeups for Flesh and Bone and another Austin-lensed movie, My Boyfriend's Back. Cockrum recently returned to Austin after a stint on the West Coast, where he attended film school and worked on a few movies on the side, including Frankenstein General Hospital. Following Return, Cockrum and Logan are jumping right onto another horror project, A Troll's Bridge, which Cockrum wrote and is producing and directing.
"The gore is being kept real minimal on this one, which is fine with me," notes Logan as he touches up Schirmacher's dead-gray Grandpa makeup. "I don't mind staying away from it. You get into that rut, and you pretty much stay there. These are more shock effects, like people being hung on a meathook. You don't actually see it. Chainsaw 2 was basically a gorefest; Tom Savini did some great stuff for it, but we're trying for a much different feeling with this one."
Still, there are some gruesome FX planned for Return, a fact that becomes obvious when Schirmacher [who is an older man, unlike the 19-year-old Dugan from the first Chainsaw] leaves the chair and Newmeyer steps in, fresh from her face-down rehearsal. "Yeah," she laughs, "all my dialogue's done tonight, so I just have to lay there. It's really boring." As she talks, she leans forward, and Logan begins creating an ugly wound in the middle of her back, just above the cut of her low-backed dress. She explains that her character encounters the Chainsaw bunch on prom night, when she, Jenny, and their dates get into a car wreck and have the misfortune of being picked up by Vilmer's towing service.
"So far," she notes cheerfully, "I've been hung on a meathook and had my nose bitten off. Tonight, I'll get set on fire. It's been great. Really, none of the violence starts until we get to the farmhouse, and Renee and I are a bit tired right now because we've been getting beat up and everything. But this has been the best learning experience I've ever had. The wounds get worse," she adds. "I look really hideous. When we have dinner, at 1:30a.m., it's like 'Don't let Lisa come in.' "
Across the room, Jacks sprawls in a chair, chatting with other cast members, all awaiting their turns with Logan. As was the case downstairs, Jacks seems anything but menacing. He's a big, open, accessible guy who looks more like what he is, an actor from the musical stage. After Return wraps, he's off to play Jesus Christ for a few weeks in a new musical, Bad Girls Upset By the Truth. It's a substantial jump from Jesus - even an avant-garde version - to Leatherface, but Jacks makes it.
"Kim was looking for a more androgynous type," the actor says. "His [Leatherface's] androgyny was kind of inferred in the first movie, but because of the times, and because of the budget and everything, it wasn't really brought forth. To tell you the truth," he confides, "when I first showed up on set, I don't think anybody realized I could do it. I'm not really like the character, although I have the physical attributes. But when I had a chainsaw in my hand, I was actually doing it, I realized I could do it, and I frighten people. I scared the crew one night."
"You scared me one night," shouts Logan from across the room.
The incident they're referring to happened a few weeks earlier in the seven-week shooting schedule, in a pine forest at the Lost Pines Nursery near Bastrop, Texas. Depending on who you ask, either Jacks got so far into his Leatherface portrayal that he momentarily lost control, or he was doing such a good job as the character that he appeared to lose control. "The crew ran away from me," Jacks says. "I was running through stock ponds and cutting down trees to get to this girl, and the crew ran away and the camera went over, because they thought I'd lost it. In the dailies, you can see the camera going up and the crew running by. I don't think they expected it. It was a real strange circumstance. It was as real as anything is, really, especially when you're that deranged, 20 cups of coffee in your system, chasing this girl who's judging how far away you are by the loudness of your chainsaw, and you're running across fields and through ponds and around trees-"
"Oh, you love it, Robbie," interjects Logan, and they both laugh. "Leatherface goes through three different transformations, and I play all three," Jacks reveals. "And I don't talk, so I have to do it all by gesturing, playing with my costumes and just trying to act like that kind of conflicted person would. He is very conflicted." Jacks laughs again. "Putting the mask on gives me something right there. I can let him assume that identity and enjoy it; I feel that he has nothing else. He's much more subjugated in this one than in the other films. It's shown in this that he really is tortured in many ways, not specifically by any of the other characters, but also by whatever his own malady is. It could be some kind of bad skin condition," the actor offers. "It could be some accident that happened. I don't know. I mean, this is kind of like Our Gang grown up, you know? It's a slice of Americana, a nuclear family." He laughs again. "It is."
Over in the trailer across the yard from the house, the young woman who takes on this particular slice of Americana is grabbing a sandwich, eating from a styrofoam container. Return marks the first leading role for actress Zellweger, who has had small parts in several other lensed-in-Texas movies and TV shows, including the USA Network's A Taste for Killing. Petite and pretty, she looks almost too fragile to stand up to the considerable demands of the script. But as she speaks, it becomes clear that she's also the kind of steel-spined person who's got the moxie to get just about anything done. "There's a lot of violence in this film, and it's exhausting," she admits. "You get tired a lot. It's physically and emotinally draining. In many of the scenes we're doing, they [the Chainsaw family] break my spirit, and I've got to pull that from somewhere, so I have to get really down in order to be able to pull that off. Actually, the worst part isn't the physical attack," she continues, "It's the psychological game that Vilmer plays with Jenny. She never really knows whether he's going to kill her. She doesn't know what he wants from her - and, you know, he's lovin' it. That's draining. It's very tiring, because you have to play it again and again."
Still, she adds, there have been times when the tension has dissipated. "There's one scene where Matthew [as Vilmer] chases me with a wrecker, and I dive through these trees, and he stands up and flashes a spotlight at me and shouts 'You don't know what the hell you're doing!' So we rehearse it two or three times, and then comes the take, and he shouts, flips on the light, and it's backwards. He turns it around real quick and tries to pull it off, but everybody's just rolling. After a certain point, when you've been working that long and it's 5 a.m., something like that happens and you just can't get it together again. You look for anything to break the tension, because it's really there."
Back in the yard, producer Robert Kuhn watches as the crew rigs the house's exterior for an upcoming stunt. If Henkel resembles a liberal-arts professor, then Kuhn, with his sun-bleached hair and muscle shirt, looks like a Third Coast beach boy. Actually, he's an Austin lawyer who not only invested in, but became a legal advisor for, the first Chainsaw. He went on to produce and star in Trespasses, with Lou Diamond Phillips and Ben Johnson, in 1983, and also retained his financial interest in one of the corporations that own the Chainsaw rights. "Then one of the major interest-holders died, and I bought his interest from the estate," he explains. "Kim is president of the corporation that owns half of it, and between the two of us, we probably have 80 or 90 percent. But we still had to option the rights, because there's a trustee who makes the decisions, based on what he thinks the owners want."
Another owner is, as one might imagine, Tobe Hooper. Kuhn notes that Return is being shot with the original director's blessings. "What we did with the trustee was basically make the same kind of offer Cannon and New Line made, but we wanted to raise the money ourselves. Otherwise, we were never going to get the picture made that we wanted to make, it would have some control over what happened after we made it."
At this point, Newmeyer strolls through on her way to the set, a huge, bloody hole in her shapely back and a ragged wound consuming half her nose. "How do I look, boys?" she asks with a flirtatious wiggle, and it's easy to see why she's not the most popular girl on lunch break once she's got her makeup on. "I've been trying to get Kim to do this for five years, to do the sequel rather than sell it off to somebody else," continues Kuhn, after an appreciative grin at Newmeyer. "And the last one was so bad that I think it convinced him we had to try."
Kuhn smiles again. "I wanted to go back to the original, and he did, too. We agreed on that right off. And the first major thing was getting him to write the script. I raised the money to get it written, and for us to start trying to put this thing together. Then, a year ago, we went out to the American Film Market in LA and talked to a bunch of people about financing. At that point I'd raised some money, but not nearly enough to make the film, and we looked at the possibilities of making a deal with a distributor. But I knew there wasn't any hope of us making one we could live with. There never is. Kim would say, 'Hey, so-and-so is interested, and it might be a deal we can live with.' So we'd talk to 'em and I'd ask three or four hard questions, and I'd just kind of look over at Kim and he'd say 'Yeah.'" Kuhn laughs. "Then I'd go back and start trying to raise some more money. I just started going to everybody I knew and I got it in bits and pieces, wherever I could." Once completed, the new Chainsaw will be shopped to distributors.
It's time to shoot an action scene, during which a couple of Houston-based stuntpeople, Oscar Carles and Jody Haselbarth [who, under the name "Tulsa", was one of TV's Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling], are doubling for Leatherface and Jenny. The script calls for Jenny to burst out of a second-story window and roll away, pursued by Leatherface. "Look, Renee," calls Jacks to Zellweger, as they find chairs among the other cast and crew assembled on the lawn to watch. "That's you and me up there."
Henkel is watching, too. As the scene is readied, he agrees that this Chainsaw really is a return - a reconnection with the roots of the film that started it all. "I think of it as an extension of the way it should be," he says softly. "As you're well aware, we did the original on very little money. We were very young. Our art was relatively unsophisticated. Hopefully we've learned a few things in the intervening years. In the original, the villains were outlandish and buffoonish. Here, they're more credible, and thus more frighetning. In the original, too, the victims particularly were little more than cardboard cutouts - at one time, we considered calling them Ken and Barbie. We used to joke about it. All the characters are much better drawn here, the victims as well as the villains. There's real empathy for the victims; you know them and empathize with them."
Several minutes later, the scene is shot and shot again, with Haselbarth drawing enthusiastic applause from the cast and crew both times for the window-crashing. It's almost midnight, time for another setup, and Henkel moves on. From the authority he projects and the businesslike way he goes about things, you'd never guess that Return is his first directing job. But it is, and appareances to the contrary, he's acutely aware of it. "I'm learning an enourmous amount on a daily basis," he says. "There's a growing confidence as I see the results, which I think have been very good. But," he adds, a smile creasing his face, "I'd be a damn fool to say I wasn't scared."
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