This Week On Cable: The Slasher Origins of Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger

Cable's rich pageant offers many things this week, but nothing quite as riveting as the spectacle of Matthew McConaughey laying the foundations of his career in the badlands of Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel hell...

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (Encore Mystery, Tuesday @ 1:20 AM)

This 1994 semi-sequel would probably have never seen the weary glare of a projector bulb if it hadn't starred native Texans McConaughey and Renee Zellweger (and in fact it opens at a high school prom, suggesting a Thalidomide-baby siblinghood to Dazed and Confused). It's a psycho, refreshingly berserk piece of work, an absurdly nonsensical genre spoof that, as far as I'm concerned, lampoons its sources more imaginatively than the Scream or Scary Movie franchises. The "family" of psychopathic miscreants here aren't even cannibals (somewhere in the middle, someone brings home pizza), and Leatherface more than resembles Weird Al Yankovic, but McConaughey as the family patriarch -- a yowling, nose-biting, script-chewing bull goose loony with a homemade hydraulic leg -- may well have delivered the performance of his career. You've never seen anything like it.

Near Dark (IFC, Wednesday @ 8:00 PM & 3:00 AM)

The modern-vampires-among-us trope is not new, but it may have gotten its first gritty, realistic treatment in this 1987 Kathryn Bigelow humdinger, which is set entirely in the midwestern heartland and features a major set piece -- a slow, savory assault on a redneck bar by a "family" of hematophages (Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen, etc.) -- that puts the current vampire trend to shame.

The Saddest Music in the World (Sundance, Monday @ 10:00 PM & 5:00 AM)

Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin, for the uninitiated filmgoer, is a comic experimenter and an obsessive fabulist who creates his own antique roadshow from obsolete filmic vocabularies, inhabited by deadpan anti-acting and physically stressed to resemble a run-down 16mm TV print that somebody, somewhere, watched the s**t out of. In this 2003 festival-fave musical epic, Depression-era Winnipeg ("the world capital of sorrow") is a fuzzily shot warehouse of cardboard houses in which the Beer Queen of the Prairie (Isabella Rossellini) is a double-amputee nouveau riche with a satin PJ-ed boytoy installed in her factory office. There's a conflicted romantic quadrangle troubled by amnesia (belonging to Maria de Medeiros, of Pulp Fiction), and a contest awarding infinite beer to the winner. Some are called, few are chosen.

Splendor in the Grass (TCM, Monday @ 11:30 PM)

The arrival of Warren Beatty and the martyrdom of Natalie Wood by way of director Elia Kazan, and one of the great howling ballads of teenage angst ever produced in America. Possibly the best American film of the early '60s not directed by Alfred Hitchcock, though it's rarely been considered as such.

Foxy Brown (Epix, Wednesday @ 4:00 AM)

Pam Grier was the Nixon era's ne plus ultra of sexualized black power, a glowering, D-cupped brick s**thouse of kickass sex appeal and curvy righteousness, and this was a prime 1974 dose of Griersploitation.

10 Rillington Place (TCM, Wednesday @ 10:30 PM)

This 1971 docudrama recreates, in precise and colorless British style, the case of one John Christie, a London nobody who was eventually caught as a serial killer in a spree that lasted thirteen years. Richard Attenborough underplays Christie and creeped all of England out. Actually filmed at the actual address, before it was demolished by the British government.

The Bank Job (The Movie Channel, Tuesday @ 12:00 midnight)

Roger Donaldson's 2008 heist saga about a real 1971 London robbery was overlooked in theaters, probably because star Jason Statham didn't suck on car batteries or drive his car off an office building. It's a gritty, relentlessly convincing, tack-sharp genre entry and it deserves eyeballs.

Blindness (Encore, Monday @ 1:20 AM)

Another lost film from 2008, Fernando Meirelles's adaptation of Jose Saramago's probably unfilmable Nobel Prizewinner isn't the book -- it couldn't be -- but by itself, it stands as a disquieting kind of mini-apocalypse, with society falling apart due to an inexplicable plague of blindness that affects everyone but Julianne Moore. Pick your own metaphorical reading.

Rosemary's Baby (HBO Signature, Wednesday @ 3:45 AM)

Still a world beater, Roman Polanski's 1968 nerve twanger initiated the age of modern horror and established its subtextual roots - from then on, the genre was a walking-talking symbol factory, and every film was about our anxiety and vulnerability. It's never been truly equaled, and if you haven't seen it, or haven't in decades, it's time. Unless you're pregnant.