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 humour (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

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A volatile, toxic potion of satire and nihilism, road movie and science fiction, violence and comedy, the unclassifiable sensibility of Alex Cox’s Repo Man is the model and inspiration for a potent strain of post-punk American comedy that includes not only Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction), but also early Coen brothers (Raising Arizona, in particular), Men in Black, and even (in a weird way) The X-Files. Otto, a baby-face punk played by Emilio Estevez, becomes an apprentice to Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), a coke-snorting, veteran repo-man-of-honour prowling the streets of a Los Angeles wasteland populated by hoods, wackos, burnouts, conspiracy theorists, and aliens of every stripe. It may seem chaotic at first glance, but there’s a “latticework of coincidence” (as Tracey Walter puts it) underlying everything. Repo Man is a key American movie of the 1980s–just as Taxi Driver, Nashville, and Chinatown are key American movies of the ’70s. With a scorching soundtrack that features Iggy Pop, Fear, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and Suicidal Tendencies. –Jim Emerson

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If Franz Kafka had been an animator and film director–oh, and a member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus–this is the sort of outrageously dystopian satire one could easily imagine him making. However, Brazil was made by Terry Gilliam, who is all of the above except, of course, Franz Kafka. Be that as it may, Gilliam sure captures the paranoid-subversive spirit of Kafka’s The Trial (along with his own Python animation) in this bureaucratic nightmare-comedy about a meek governmental clerk named Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) whose life is destroyed by a simple bug. Not a software bug, a real bug (no doubt related to Kafka’s famous Metamorphosis insect) that gets smooshed in a printer and causes a typographical error unjustly identifying an innocent citizen, one Mr. Buttle, as suspected terrorist Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro). When Sam becomes enmeshed in unravelling this bureaucratic glitch, he himself winds up labelled as a miscreant.

The movie presents such an unrelentingly imaginative and savage vision of 20th-century bureaucracy that it almost became a victim of small-minded studio management itself–until Gilliam surreptitiously screened his cut for the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, who named it the best movie of 1985 and virtually embarrassed Universal into releasing it. –Jim Emerson If Franz Kafka had been an animator and film director–oh, and a member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus–Brazil is the sort of outrageously dystopian satire one could easily imagine him making. In fact it was made by Terry Gilliam, who is all of the above except, of course, Franz Kafka. Be that as it may, Gilliam captures the paranoid-subversive spirit of Kafka’s The Trial (along with his own Python animation) in this bureaucratic nightmare-comedy about a meek government clerk named Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) whose life is destroyed by a simple bug. It’s not a software bug but a real bug (no doubt related to Kafka’s famous Metamorphosis insect) that gets squashed in a printer and causes a typographical error unjustly identifying an innocent citizen, one Mr Buttle, as suspected terrorist Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro). When Sam becomes enmeshed in unravelling this bureaucratic tangle, he himself winds up labelled as a miscreant. The movie presents such an unrelentingly imaginative and savage vision of 20th-century bureaucracy that it almost became a victim of small-minded studio management itself–until Gilliam surreptitiously screened his cut for the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, who named it the best movie of 1985 and virtually embarrassed Universal into releasing it. –Jim Emerson

On the DVD: Brazil comes to DVD in a welcome anamorphic print of the full director’s cut–here running some 136 minutes. Disappointingly the only extra feature is the 30-minute making-of documentary “What Is Brazil?”, which consists of on-set and behind-the-scenes interviews. There’s nothing about the film’s controversial release history (covered so comprehensively on the North American Criterion Collection release), nor is Gilliam’s illuminating, irreverent directorial commentary anywhere to be found. The only other extra here is the ubiquitous theatrical trailer. A welcome release of a real classic, then, but something of a missed opportunity. –Mark Walker

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Amazon.co.uk Review
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 humour (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

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – The Seriously Ultimate Edition

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Amazon.co.uk Review
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 humour (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

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – The Seriously Ultimate Edition

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Amazon.co.uk Review
The Crow set the standard for dark and violent comic-book movies (like Spawn or director Alex Proyas’s superior follow-up, Dark City), but it will forever be remembered as the film during which star Brandon Lee (son of martial arts legend Bruce Lee) was accidentally killed on the set by a loaded gun. The filmmakers were able to digitally sample what they’d captured of Lee’s performance and piece together enough footage to make the film releasable. Indeed, it is probably more fascinating for that post-production story than for the tale on the screen. The Crow is appropriately cloaked in ominous expressionistic shadows, oozing urban dread and occult menace from every dank, concrete crack, but it really adds up to a simple and perfunctory tale of ritual revenge. Guided by a portentous crow (standing in for Poe’s raven), Lee plays a deceased rock musician who returns from the grave to systematically torture and kill the outlandishly violent gang of hoodlums who murdered him and his fiancée the year before. The film is worth watching for its compelling visuals and genuinely nightmarish, otherworldly ambience. –Jim Emerson

The Crow

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Amazon.co.uk Review
A volatile, toxic potion of satire and nihilism, road movie and science fiction, violence and comedy, the unclassifiable sensibility of Alex Cox’s Repo Man is the model and inspiration for a potent strain of post-punk American comedy that includes not only Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction), but also early Coen brothers (Raising Arizona, in particular), Men in Black, and even (in a weird way) The X-Files. Otto, a baby-face punk played by Emilio Estevez, becomes an apprentice to Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), a coke-snorting, veteran repo-man-of-honour prowling the streets of a Los Angeles wasteland populated by hoods, wackos, burnouts, conspiracy theorists, and aliens of every stripe. It may seem chaotic at first glance, but there’s a “latticework of coincidence” (as Tracey Walter puts it) underlying everything. Repo Man is a key American movie of the 1980s–just as Taxi Driver, Nashville, and Chinatown are key American movies of the ’70s. With a scorching soundtrack that features Iggy Pop, Fear, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and Suicidal Tendencies. –Jim Emerson

Repo Man

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Amazon.co.uk Review
When Ridley Scott’s cut of Blade Runner was finally released in 1993, one had to wonder why the studio hadn’t done it right the first time–11 years earlier. This version is so much better, mostly because of what’s been eliminated (the ludicrous and redundant voice-over narration and the phoney happy ending) rather than what’s been added (a bit more character development and a brief unicorn dream that drops a big hint about Deckard’s origins). Star Harrison Ford originally recorded the narration under duress at the insistence of Warner Bros. executives who thought the story needed further “explanation”; he later confessed that he thought if he did it badly they wouldn’t use it. (Moral: never overestimate the taste of movie executives.) The movie’s spectacular futuristic vision of Los Angeles–a perpetually dark and rainy metropolis that’s the nightmare antithesis of “Sunny Southern California”–is still its most seductive feature, another worldly atmosphere in which you can immerse yourself. The movie’s shadowy visual style, along with its classic private-detective/murder-mystery plot line (with Ford on the trail of a murderous android, or “replicant”), makes Blade Runner one of the few science fiction pictures legitimately to claim a place in the film noir tradition. And, as in the best noir, the sleuth discovers a whole lot more (about himself and the people he encounters) than he anticipates. The cast also includes Sean Young, Edward James Olmos, Daryl Hannah Rutger Hauer and M. Emmet Walsh. –Jim Emerson, Amazon.com

In the Box Set: It is a fitting testament to Blade Runner‘s enduring appeal that it should receive the red-carpet box set treatment in this Collector’s Edition, which represents a sizeable outlay not least in terms of shelf space. The chunky black box (about the size of the yellow pages) houses a slide-out tray containing the DVD, eight original lobby cards an original one-sheet movie poster, the draft shooting script and a movie image card with the corresponding 35mm film frame attached. As with all such sets the whole is rapidly diminished by removing its parts, presenting the dilemma of whether to mount the poster and pictures, or leave them pristine but unseen in their original state.

The DVD included contains Ridley Scott’s director’s cut version of the film, but offers no new features or commentaries which would have added considerably to the set’s desirability. The original draft shooting script by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples does, however, provide some fascinating insights in its moments of departure from the version that was finally filmed. Perhaps the most compelling example is Deckard’s final, decisive contribution to the “is he or isn’t he” debate: “I knew it on the roof that night. We were bothers, Roy Batty and I! Combat models of the highest order. We had fought in wars not yet dreamed of in vast nightmares still unnamed. We were the new people … Roy and me and Rachael! We were made for this world. It was ours!” –Steve Napleton

Blade Runner

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