The ultimate version of a classic horror film. Painstakingly restored from the original 16mm ECO negatives, this special edition presents Tobe Hooper's classic film as you've never seen it before. Now...step into the twisted world of the ultimate dysfunctional family and rediscover the total madness of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". Includes: audio commentary featuring Tobe Hooper, director of photography Daniel Pearl and Gunnar Hansen ("Leatherface"), 30 minutes of deleted scenes and outtakes, blooper reel, original theatrical trailers and television spots and still photos. Starring: Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow, Gunnar Hansen.
This sensational, extremely influential, 1974 low-budget horror movie directed by Tobe Hooper (Poltergeist, Lifeforce, Salem's Lot), may be notorious for its title, but it's also a damn fine piece of moviemaking. And it's blood-curdling scary, too. Loosely based on the true crimes of Ed Gein (also a partial inspiration for Psycho), the original Jeffrey Dahmer, Texas Chainsaw Massacre follows a group of teenagers who pick up a hitchhiker and wind up in a backwoods horror chamber where they're held captive, tortured, chopped up, and impaled on meat hooks by a demented cannibalistic family, including a character known as Leatherface who maniacally wields one helluva chainsaw. The movie's powerful sense of dread is heightened by its grainy, semi-documentary style--but it also has a wicked sense of humor (and not that camp, self-referential variety that became so tiresome in subsequent horror films of the '70s, '80s, and '90s). OK, in case you couldn't tell, it's "not for everyone." But as a landmark in the development of the horror/slasher genre, it ranks with Psycho, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. --Jim Emerson
