"Actor: Jerry Lorenz"

• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: 40th Anniversary Restoration - 2 Disc Standard Edition | Blu Ray | (17/11/2014) from £29.99   |  Saving you £-10.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  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 | DVD | (02/10/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A