by Miguel E. Rodriguez
DIRECTOR: Wes Craven
CAST: Sandra Peabody, Lucy Grantham, David Hess, Fred J. Lincoln, Jeramie Rain, Marc Sheffler, Richard Towers, Martin Kove
MY RATING: 4/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 65%
PLOT: Two teenage girls heading to a rock concert for try to score marijuana in the city, where they are kidnapped and brutalized by a gang of psychopathic convicts.
*Note: This review contains spoilers.
I am not quite sure where to start with this review. On the one hand, The Last House on the Left resembles the lowest kind of shock-ploitation movie…and if that’s not a word, it should be. Rock-bottom production values, bad edits, hammy acting, gratuitous nudity, incongruous music on the soundtrack, and some of the most repulsive violent acts I’ve ever had the displeasure of watching on a movie screen. (Or TV screen, whatever.)
On the other hand, the sickest scenes are followed by an extremely gratifying second act where the chief perpetrators in the first act get what’s coming to them in an orgy of carnage that makes Halloween look like The Little Princess. So, we’ve got a situation where the traumatic scenes at the beginning are necessary if the over-the-top revenge killings at the end achieve the necessary catharsis. The question becomes: are you, the viewer, willing to sit through the filmic equivalent of eating a bowl of spider eggs in order to get to the chocolate cheesecake for dessert?
The story is as bare bones as it gets, except for the twist ending (and if you’ve ever seen Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, none of this would have come as a surprise anyway). Two teenage girls, Mari and Phyllis, head to the city for a rock concert where a band called “Bloodlust” will be performing. Subtle. They try to score some weed from a skeevy character in a doorway, and before you can say “cautionary tale”, they’re in the clutches of four psychopaths who proceed to kidnap them, take them to the woods outside of the city, and force the girls to…but I find myself reluctant to even type out what happens to the girls. Maybe I should leave that stuff out, if for no other reason than to preserve the surprises for any reader who still feels adventurous enough to watch this movie cold, as I did. Suffice it to say the violent acts that follow are as distasteful as they can get. If you know anyone who gets turned on or excited by these scenes, delete them from your contacts.
What makes these scenes even more outrageous is the background score used for some of the scenes. In one shot, the bound and gagged victims are being slowly carried out the window of the apartment where the psychos were being holed up. The apartment is 2 stories up, so they have to be carried down the fire escape, a delicate process. And in the background, the score provides us with music that, instead of making the scene harrowing, makes it sound instead like a comedy beat from a cheesy TV comedy. This jarring musical device is used again when the villains are driving the car out to the woods, with the girls tied up in the trunk, and again during a rape scene, although the music is far less giddy than before…more like a blues tune.
I’m shaking my head even now, thinking about it. What was Craven thinking? In interviews on the Blu Ray, Craven talks about how he had been disillusioned by how Westerns and war movies had glamorized violence to the point that it looked “cool” when good guys killed bad guys. So, he set out to make a movie that showed violence, real and true, and showed the real effects of that kind of violence, without cutting away, without fancy camera tricks, and without anyone feeling good about it afterward. He wanted to show violence as an ugly act.
Well, he succeeded. The violence in The Last House on the Left is ugly, depressing, and deplorable. It’s been said that it’s impossible to make a truly anti-war film because war, by its nature, is exciting. Well, this may be the first truly anti-violence film, despite the amount of gut-churning violence it contains. There is nothing exciting about any of it, not even at the end (which I’m getting to, I promise).
But I have to ask myself: while the goal is worthy, was this really the way to go about it? At one point, the psychos’ leader, Krug, tells one of the girls, Phyllis, to pee her pants, or he’ll cut her friend, Mari. Phyllis complies, in one of the most downright miserable scenes I’ve ever seen. They’re forced to disrobe and make out with each other. In another scene, one of the girls is stabbed so many times she’s disemboweled.
In another one of those Blu Ray interviews, David Hess, the actor who played Krug, nonchalantly mentions how, during a scene where he rapes Mari, the actress (Sandra Peabody) suddenly got this look in her eyes, like she had really gone somewhere else mentally, and he says, “At that point, I knew that if I’d really wanted to, I could have f****d her, and she wouldn’t have done anything.” What??? So, yeah, the movie up to this point is ugly, unpleasant, repulsive, pick an adjective. I found myself wondering how Craven found a career after this movie.
But then, a saving grace, plot-wise. The killers’ car is dead, so they seek help/refuge from the people who live in a nearby house…and wouldn’t you know it, this is where Mari lived with her parents. After some uneasy conversation, the parents offer them room and board for the night. At some point, the mother discovers a clue that leads to the inescapable conclusion that these people have murdered her daughter. She informs her husband, and in the dark of night, he carefully locks all the doors, removes the window handles, and lays out some rudimentary traps that look like nothing so much as the prototypes for Home Alone: whipped cream on the floor, hard-to-see wires in doorways to trip you up, even an ingenious way to electrocute someone that, if it doesn’t actually work in real life, it really should.
The bloodbath that follows is chaotic and messy, much like it might be in real life if an unassuming doctor tried to kill three people. (Don’t worry, I didn’t lose count…the fourth psychopath has been seduced by Mari’s mother and led out to the neighboring woods where she gets her own revenge, Lorena Bobbitt style.) To Craven’s credit, his credo for this film remains intact: while the violent acts inflicted on the bad guys do provide a catharsis, they are hardly glamorous or exciting.
(I haven’t even mentioned the two bumbling cops who provide an insanely inadequate level of comic relief…and of them is Martin Kove, who would later achieve fame as the sensei of Cobra Kai in The Karate Kid.)
So, the question remains: are you willing to sit through this series of depraved acts of (pretend) violence that have been designed to remind you that real violence is not cool? See, I already knew that. But then, I’m in my fifties. The Last House on the Left seems geared towards younger mindsets than mine who, at the time (1972), had not yet seen The Silence of the Lambs or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, or Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, a movie that covers this same ground with equal or even greater impact, but without spending quite so much time depicting the violence it’s eschewing. Craven’s philosophy and motives are sound. I am just not a fan of this movie’s method.
P.S. The story of this film’s surprise success is no doubt well-known, as is the fact this was a fledgling director’s first film. I assure you, I’m well aware of the backstory, but to delve into that particular rabbit hole would result in a 3,000-word essay, which I have neither the time nor the inclination to write. I’ve decided to focus on the immediate effect this movie had on me personally.
2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! 