This 55 minute documentary goes behind the scenes of the 1994 filming of Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (later released as Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation) in Pflugerville, Texas. It includes on-set footage and interviews with the cast and crew. It is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the film that went on to become the black sheep of the Texas Chainsaw franchise.Professor Brian Huberman examined that schizophrenia closely in 1993, when he filmed a documentary about the making of Return. (This movie is the fourth instalment in the Chainsaw chronicles, though Huberman and other purists consider it the first that's worthy of the 1973 original. Like the original cult classic, Return was written and directed by Kim Henkel.)Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation itself got lost in movie limbo, stuck between a theatrical release, going straight to video and going nowhere. Along with it languished Huberman's documentary.Chainsaw examines the dark face of that scary, exciting complexity. When Leatherface, perhaps the angriest white male, finds that John Wayne behaviour fails in a settled society, he reacts by going berserk. We in the audience are both thrilled and terrified -- frightened of the madman and his McCulloch, yet also gleefully contemptuous.fusion. (Like the psycho killers of Psycho and Silence of the Lambs, Leatherface was based on real-life ghoul Ed Gein, a demented Wisconsin farmer who enquired about sex-change operations.) In the next generation, Leatherface, played by actor Robert Jacks, dresses for dinner in a rouged skin mask and a breastplate made from a female body. The documentary cuts from the scene being shot to the set, where gender roles are decidedly relaxed. Between takes, Jacks and the mixed-sex crew play with the booby-body suit in the giddy manner of grade-school girls with lipstick. The contrast underscores the on-screen freak's reverence for his guise, and reminds us that gender roles remain unsettled and important.
Huberman was raised in Britain, but was immersed in the myths of the American frontier. "I was," he declares, "a victim or survivor of the famous Walt Disney series Davy Crockett." Growing up and going to film school didn't cure his passion for cowboys. In 1975, after graduating from the British National Film and Television School, he took a job with Rice's department of art and art history. There, he teaches filmmaking technique, French New Wave and Sergei Eisenstein's dialectic theory of montage. He also indulges his obsession by teaching a class on Westerns, and by continuing to make films about Texas legends.
After arriving in Texas, he travelled to Brackettville, where The Alamo was filmed. Wielding his Super 8 camera, he expected to record nostalgia for the John Wayne movie. Instead, he found people concerned with the real battle of the Alamo; Mexican-Americans especially remembered it in a non-Hollywood way. Myth, he realised, is a flash point for conflict.
