Movie Details

Original Title
» The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Alternate Title
» Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The

Year
» 1974

Director
» Tobe Hooper

Cast
» Marilyn Burns, Allen Danziger, Paul A. Partain, William Vail, Teri McMinn, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow, Gunnar Hansen, John Dugan, Robert Courtin, William Creamer, John Henry Faulk, Jerry Green, Ed Guinn, Joe Bill Hogan

IMDb
» http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072271/

 Product Photos

 Video Review

 Discjunkie's Comments

Packaging / Design

This set was quite a milestone in the world of DVD designs when it first came out, and to be honest, it still comes of as an incredibly clever and unique design.

The case is made up of your typical super jewel case, which has a piece of glossy cardboard (designed to look like a pack of fresh minced meat) glued to the back of it. The cardboard looks surprisingly good and detailed even though it's quite a cheap trick.

The jewel case then fits nicely into a partially clear plastic slipcase, featuring a couple of actual stickers for the back, which makes all the more sense when you see them together with the minced meat back cover. Truly a wonderful idea and quite well put together.

As for the "real" front cover (which isn't as impressive as the meat on the back) we're presented with a black plastic design featuring a foldout chainsaw blade that opens up to reveal a list of special features and the typical movie yada yada.

This release is kind of hard to find in mint condition these days but despite the easily damaged jagged-edged slipcase front, it still stands out as one of the most memorable, and possibly most well designed releases of this film to date.

Disc contents / Extras

Being quite an old set it shouldn't come as a surprise that there are far better releases out on the market by now.

Never the less, extras are quite interesting but the deleted footage is missing a lot of audio and image quality ranges from poor to average. The menu quality and overall design feels really outdated and wouldn't count as very impressive these days but that's not to much of a shocker either, I guess.

A true fan of this film will probably want to pick this up just for packaging but would certainly be wise to go for a later edition when it comes to audio and video quality.

Sidenotes

This is a 30th anniversary re-issue of the original Pioneer special edition. The only difference is the now classic "meat case" packaging which replaces the old keepcase special edition. Both Pioneer editions are now OOP and have been replaced by a new ultimate edition steelbook from Dark Sky Films.

The meat case edition was also available for the Canadian market but it's obviously long gone there as well.

Some sources have this release listed with a double-sided disc but so far I havn't been able to locate any actual photos of such a disc, so I'm assuming this rumor to be a simple case of miss-information.