The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: 40th Anniversary Collector’s Edition Review. Definitive Version To Grab
By: Brandon Wolfe
The title of ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ is so bluntly evocative that people who have never seen the film have generally assumed the worst of it. The title conjures up images of horrific brutality and graphic gore, and that’s before you add the element of cannibalism into the mix. Yet, truth be told, ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ isn’t gory, or even especially bloody, at all, nor is does it depict any grisly displays of cannibalism. By the standards of today’s horror, the film is actually fairly tame. Despite the mental imagery ascribed to the film by reputation, this is not a stomach-churning endurance test.
And yet, it kind of is. While ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ doesn’t saturate us with viscera, it remains, forty years later, one of cinema’s most unsettling pieces of work. From its ominous opening voiceover (gravely intoned by John Larroquette) fallaciously affirming the tale’s true-life roots (a device that would become commonplace in horror movies in the decades ahead), followed by murky glimpses of a grave-robbing in progress, the iconically haunting camera flashbulb sound effects, and then, finally, a slow pullback on a decaying corpse mounted upon a gravesite while a news reporter’s voice fills us in on the background details of the horrors we are witnessing. ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ has barely even begun yet and it’s already seared its way into our minds.
The story follows young Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns), her obnoxious, paraplegic brother Franklin (Paul A. Partain) and a vanful of friends as they head into the backroads of Nowhere, Texas to inspect the grave of the Hardestys’ grandfather in light of the recent vandalism reports. Along the way, they pick up a manic hitchhiker, who cuts himself open with a pocket knife for the sheer pleasure of it before being ejected from the vehicle. As they continue ahead, they stop at a local gas station to refuel, only to be told by the folksy owner that the tanks are empty.
The group decides to visit an old house once belonging to the Hardesty family. Some of the friends peel off to find a rumored swimming hole and end up finding an old house instead. Entering to request some gas from the owners, they instead find a hulking butcher with a mask made of skin who bludgeons one teenager with a mallet and hangs another alive on a meat hook. This is Leatherface, and the capper to his introductory scene - his ominous, angry slamming of the steel door to his slaughterhouse - still has the power to send a chill through you.
Eventually Sally is the last teen standing and enters a waking nightmare. After finding all of her friends dead, she is pursued for what feels like an eternity by a chainsaw-wielding Leatherface, who always seems to be about two centimeters behind her. She seeks sanctity at the gas station, only to find that the owner, who initially seems to be her kindly salvation, counts Leatherface among his kin and brings Sally back to the house from which she just frantically escaped. If this weren’t bad enough, the hitchhiker, also a relative, emerges onto the scene. And what follows is what can only be considered a filmed fever dream, as Sally is taken to the dinner table, surrounded by the family, and is offered up to the decrepit grandfather for slaughter. Sally’s ceaseless screams, running continuously for minutes on end, make you feel like you’re going insane as you watch her plight. It still stands as one of the most purely unnerving sequences ever put to film.
‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ rightly has a place as one of the true classics of American horror. Though it spawned a number of lousy sequels and reboot attempts (not to mention the shoddy wave of myriad imitators it inspired over the decades; basically every slasher movie made since owes at least some debt to it), nothing has diminished its raw, uncompromising power.
To mark the film’s 40th anniversary, Dark Sky Films has put out a colossal four-disc collector’s edition Blu-Ray/DVD combo pack with enough meaty extras to fill a freezer. Present here are a whopping four commentary tracks, including one featuring director Tobe Hooper, Leatherface himself Gunnar Hansen and cinematographer Daniel Pearl, and another bringing us the late Marilyn Burns, Partain, and production designer Robert Burns. The set also offers the informative feature-length documentary ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Shocking Truth’; in-depth interviews with production manager Ron Bozman, Grandpa portrayer John Dugan and editor J. Larry Carroll; ‘Flesh Wounds: Seven Stories of the Saw,’ a behind-the-scenes look at the ‘Chain Saw’ phenomenon; and trailers, deleted scenes, outtakes and much, much more. In addition, though the movie has a naturally grungy, almost snuff-film quality, the transfer here looks quite nice. For any fan of this horror classic, this is the definitive version to grab.
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