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Category:    Home > Reviews > Horror > Thriller > Texas Chain Saw Massacre - 1974 Special Edition (Pioneer DVD)

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre - Special Edition (1974 Original Version/Pioneer DVD)


Picture: C+ Sound: C+ Extras: B Film: B



Dark Sky is issuing a 4K upgrade of the film for 2014 for its 40th Anniversary, but they restored the film for Blu-ray, yet the analysis of the original film itself and what did or did not work for this edition is still important to fans, so the review remains untouched. You can read about the new Blu-ray versions at the following links:


Dark Sky U.S. Blu-ray

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/7588/The+Texas+Chain+Saw+Massacre


Australian Blu-ray

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/10759/Texas+Chainsaw+Massacre+(1974+Original+Versio



The original 1974 Texas Chain Saw Massacre is undoubtedly a classic of the Horror genre, unchallenged as the film of the moment in the genre until John Carpenter's Halloween four years later. Like George Romero's original 1968 Night of the Living Dead and Ganja & Hess the year before it, it was a low-budget picture with major impact. Shot on 16mm film, it landed up out-gunning most of the 35mm films doing the same storytelling at the time. Pioneer has issued a new Special Edition DVD of the film, with many extras, but it may not be as special as it should be.


The film, of course, features five doomed teenagers traveling by van into the wrong area. This is unbeknownst to them, of course, and to the audience at first. Even if you know the story, what is fascinating about the early scenes is how they focus on only weird and unusual moments, scenes meant to throw the audience off kilter a bit. Wiser members should see the possibility of things getting worse, but part of the problem is that many people tend to tolerate too much oddity without questioning it. Hooper knew this and plays on this fact very well.


At the same time, in keeping with the approach of doing this as a documentary in the opening, Hooper wisely abandons the usual semantics (visuals) of Horror films at first. He also abandons the documentary idea once the narrative kicks in, only using it again to bookend the film with an epilogue. The comedy and weird moments are not quite Horror standards either, though they would be later. Like Alfred Hitchcock with Janet Leigh's Marion Crane in Psycho, Hooper uses this to pull the audience along into the story until they are so deep into it, the real meat of the story can kick in. No film owes more to the original Psycho than this picture.


Of course, there is a meat plant near by, and some of the locals have become permanently interested in human flesh. Even with that known, or that the Ed Gein murders inspired this film (and Psycho), the film still endures because it is so of the moment. The film sadly began the sado-masochistic trend and celebrated ugliness in which the victims to be have their demise rooted for by the audience. Though the how stupid can they be, so why should I care tradition has been going on in Horror since the earliest women victims.


Many writers have made much out of this film and themes of consumerism gone wrong, as one can do with any film about cannibalism, as well as the idea of the film as representation of Vietnam's horrors. If it does, it still would not be as fully and as timely so as Romero's Night of the Living Dead, but it is a product of that era and that authentic connection is why the sequels and remake to Chain Saw never work. The original two sequels to Romero's films, on the other hand, do because they have a broader, more detailed vision Horror as genre and horror in real life than Hooper's films and work have demonstrated.


It has also been noted that these victims are beneficiaries of the freedoms offered by various civil rights movements of the time, though no one suggests that made them too laid back, so much so to get them killed. That does have weight. The inverse of that is, for coming out of that, they are not very politically aware and do not demonstrate any common sense benefit from that if they ever were.


To their credit, though, it is often hard to separate the difference between space that is occupied and space that is not. What would seem like an abandoned house to those who have could easily turn out to be home for the less fortunate, first the residents, then the visitors. As a matter of fact, the idea of open space always eventually becomes a trap for the unsuspecting here.


The cinematography always manages to achieve this, despite the fact that is was shot in 16mm. To this day, that embarrasses so many 35mm films today whether they are Horror pictures or far from it. This was shot for a big screen and both Hooper and cinematographer Daniel Pearl knew 35mm blow-ups were going to be made. The commercial and critical endurance of the film are the result, something to consider in the 4K HD age.


The DVD boasts a new widescreen Digital Superscan transfer supervised by director Tobe Hooper for this DVD. That is correct, but that is not as good as it sounds. The SuperScan (it is written both ways in the notes) system is High Definition, but it was done years ago, so it is actually an older analog High Definition system, which was state-of-the-art at the time, but pales to what current digital HD is capable of. A simple comparison to Criterion Rockumentary DVDs (Gimme Shelter, the Monterey Pop boxed set) shows this transfer's age.


Certainly, Hooper's supervision of the transfer gives it its authentic color and hues, as did Dean Cundey on Anchor Bay's pre-Divimax/pre-HD copies on DVD of Halloween a few years ago, but it also needs updating as my review of that edition (we've covered several Blu-ray editioms since) shows how the newer transfer was wrecked by a digital HD transfer where Cundey was not involved, resulting in a cleaner, clearer, ultimately less faithful rendering of the film. That was no excuse for Pioneer not to redo this film for DVD, but doing HD the wrong way would have been no better.


The 16mm film was 1.33 X 1, the image here is transferred at an oddly framed 1.66 X 1, but looks best when you play it back on equipment that is designed to get the best benefits from anamorphic enhanced picture material, the 1.78 X 1 framing looks much better. That more closely matches the 1.85 X 1 (U.S.) and 1.75 X 1 (U.K.) aspect ratios the film would have been projected in. Unfortunately, nothing can make up for the downtrade of the analog HD to older composite digital tape, which for all practical purposes is an analog transfer. On top of that downgrade, digital video noise reduction was applied, further degrading the image, so this is old. The existence of the old animated Pioneer tuning fork logo from their VHS and 12-inch LaserDisc formats, though the new logo is all over the DVD packaging, was a bad sign, but seeing the term LaserDisc on many of the menus and the Elite Entertainment name and logo after that, makes this one of the most blatant recyclings of a title to DVD to date.


This is essentially the same Special Edition that was on LaserDisc, without the updating technically most companies do for their titles. This extends to the sound, which is referred to as a new stereo surround re-mix supervised by Hooper, but do not expect any 5.1 like you might get from Anchor Bay. All we get here is a Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo track that absolutely shows its age, not from the age of the actual 1974 soundmasters, but the limited range of the equipment used to do the remix in the first place. At least on LaserDisc, you would have had fuller PCM CD Stereo that would have decoded even better when Pro Logic was used. After the amazing mix Pioneer offered in their DTS edition of Akira (also covered elsewhere on this site), it is too bad this film did not get enjoy that luxury, because it is a luxury the viewer has been denied too. The original mono sound is reproduced in Dolby Digital 2.0 for purists and comparison, but even restored; it is far from how good the optical mono has sounded in movie houses and drive-ins.


The skimpy paper piece inside the Super Jewel Box case of this limited version of the pressing tells us that the film was painstakingly restored from the original 16mm ECO negatives, but it turns out the original camera stock was actually reversal type film. Eastman Kodak's ECO stock (#7252) was extremely hard to expose, a situation made worse when a daylight filter was needed, which was often. A new 16mm inter-negative was made, but those stocks often have a yellowish cast and this DVD shows that. Hooper, Pearl and company need to go back and really restore and re-transfer this properly, including even newer safety stocks as much improvement in film stocks have occurred since 1995. It is also worth noting that this would not have worked as well if shot in digital HD. Though Danny Boyle shot his Horror flick 28 Days Later that way recently, it just cannot do as much as even a regular 16mm production could, then or now. In fairness, there was only poor analog video in 1974, with something like TV's Dark Shadows (the original TV version versus the feature films and TV revivals) being what Horror on video was. That works too, but it is also not the same thing. Film gives it the natural and documentary feel that makes it most believable.


That leaves the extras, which are the best reason to get this DVD. Just about all items on the original film become collectible, so this one comes in a initial special packaging in a hard Super Jewel Box that comes with a plastic slipcase, which itself has a life-up piece on the cover that has the jagged edges of an actual chainsaw. Don't pull it too much up, or you might pull the spine apart.


Hopper, Pearl, and original Leatherface Gunnar Hansen have a great time on the audio commentary, joking around and giving us priceless information about the filmmaking process and great things about this film. In the future, a second commentary ought to be added that could include them again years later, but could also have some film scholars with differing points-of-view about the film itself.


There is a nice section of still, posters, ads, and collectibles. The blooper reel is amusing, deleted scenes worth checking out (though none of them feel like they should have remained, they are worth catching), and the alternate footage includes all the footage shot for the brief, still chilling enough first abduction by Leatherface. This is all still all archival and valuable, without which, this DVD would not have been worth issuing.


We also have a collection of trailers for this film, and one each for each unnecessary sequel. What is striking about the sequels, besides how long they took to get made, I show visually inferior they are to the original. Despite being shot in 35mm, they look flat, plain, and visually unengaging. All they do, even with Hooper directing the first sequel, is tiredly repeat the original. The Leatherface in each looks too clean or just plain badly rendered. One mask is so bad, if you cut it diagonally, you would have the first step to doing the film version of the musical Phantom of the Opera!


Now, on the 30th anniversary, we have a remake that has been released. Music video director Marcus Nispel (Janet Jackson's Runaway, Elton John's Believe, Crystal Waters' 100% Pure Love) was originally slated to helm the Arnold Schwarzenegger film End of Days, but his ego and requirements were so outrageous, he was replaced by veteran Peter Hyams (Outland, The Star Chamber, the 1990 remake of Narrow Margin) and did a good job. Luckily for Nispel, he stayed on the remake and had original cinematographer Pearl with him.


Dante Spinotti, A.S.C., A.I.C, also found himself shooting the remake of his own original work, when he shot Red Dragon (2002), an ultimately inferior remake of Michael Mann's Manhunter (1986, both reviewed elsewhere on this site). History repeated itself with the Chain Saw remake, which gets into interesting problems with many changes culturally and genre-wise 30 years later. But there is the original, which would soon be countered by Halloween and ultimately trumped by Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980), which is making more than passing responses to Hooper's original film. Either way, the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre may be ultimately overrated, but it remains a one of a kind film too important to ignore.



- Nicholas Sheffo


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