This is a brilliant transfer and is the only one that has used the original 16mm film that went through Pearl's camera. And yet more pixels doesn't mean the film's been gussied up - it still looks like a film shot in the 1970's. Slaughter family name sign hanging over the gas station/barbecue door or the animals on the wallpaper of a child's bedroom in Sally's grandfather's old house. This is a film I have seen probably more than any other and yet I saw numerous things I'd never seen before, like the W.E. Now Dark Sky Films has issued a 40th anniversary, 4K scan DVD/blu-ray combo collector's edition release of the film and it is, in a word, remarkable.
#Texas chainsaw massacre rating movie
The movie has been hugely influential over the past forty years, but never equaled (Rob Zombie's "The Devil's Rejects" comes closest). Both Hooper and his cinematographer came within inches of a live, running chainsaw to capture the infamous Leatherface 'dance' which ends the film. Young cinematographer Daniel Pearl devised one of the most astonishing shots in cinema history with his wide angle lens tracking under a swing to follow Pam (Teri McMinn) to her appointment with a meat hook. Hooper went to incredible lengths to devise the nerve-shredding score. Burns used rotting animal carcasses and real human teeth and skeletons to dress the Texas farmhouse.
#Texas chainsaw massacre rating skin
But Hooper and his art director Bob Burns conjured up a picture of hell in rural America, aided by the inspired performances of Shakespearean actor Jim Siedow as the conflicted older brother of the demented Hitchhiker and mentally disabled Leatherface, whose three human skin masks dictated his changing personas. The 'tragedy that befell five youths' (Hooper directed narrator John Larroquette to go for an Orson Welles-like sound) quickly earned a notorious reputation, and yet the film contains hardly any gore (there are exactly four scenes where we see blood let - the Hitchhiker's (Ed Neal) cutting of his own palm, his razoring of Franklin's (Paul Partain) arm, the pricking of Sally's (Marilyn Burns) finger and Leatherface's (Gunnar Hansen) chainsaw hitting his own leg). Hooper came up with his story of five kids' run-in with cannibalistic maniacs having been haunted by stories told by Wisconsin relatives when he was very young (it wasn't until after he'd made the movie that he learned that the maniac who dug up graves and made lamps and furniture from human remains was Ed Gein), but it was also invested by the troubling events in an America that had just experienced the Manson murders, the Vietnam War, Watergate and gas shortages. What is there left to say about Tobe Hooper's 1974 horror masterpiece "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre?" Although the shoot was arduous, filmed during a Texas summer where temperatures routinely shot over 100 degrees, the film was inspired in so many ways.