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
