March 10, 2005
Last House on the Left
Last House on the Left was always one of those movies I heard of because it was impossible to see. An uncut version doesn't exist anymore, and it was banned in New Zealand for about thirty years. Now it's turned up on DVD, in a version that's as uncut as any we're likely to see and packed to the gills with commentary tracks, documentaries and those infamous trailers.
The movie was written & directed by Wes Craven and produced by Sean S. Cunningham; they went on to individually launch the biggest two horror franchises of the last thirty years (Craven with A Nightmare On Elm Street, Cunningham with Friday the 13th). The two of them and film student Steve Miner (who went on to direct every sort of pap from Friday the 13th Part 2 to Forever Young) formed the core crew, and the movie was made for a tiny amount of money.
In all the years I've been reading about it, it's ben mightily built up. Simply put, it's one of the most vilified movies ever made. The first time I saw it I was mighty anxious - afraid that it'd be unbearably disturbing, worried that it'd be unbearably inept. And do you know what? It was both. Parts of the movie were so savage that I could barely stand to look at the screen, and other parts were so embarrassingly bad that I nearly had to look away.
Yet I find myself wanting to praise it to the sky. It does what great art should always do: it stimulates the emotion and the intellect. I would wager that it's impossible not to have some kind of extreme reaction to the movie. In fact I'd be a little concerned about anyone who claimed to enjoy it.
The plot of the movie - which Craven admits to stealing from Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring - is extremely simple: two teenage girls on the way to a rock concert are waylaid by a group of escaped convicts who humiliate, torture, rape and murder them. By a staggering coincidence the killers wind up at the house of the parents of one of the girls; the parents figure out what is happend and humiliate, torture, castrate and kill them. The end.
The scenes where the two girls are tortured in the woods are very well done (in contrast to the rest of the movie, which is very amateurish) and extremely disturbing. There isn't a particularly high level of violence and gore, but the psychological nastiness is of a very high level.
Apparently most of these sequences were improvised and the story goes that one of the girls, despite having known the filmmakers and the other actors for years, managed to convince herself that the situation was real and tried to leave the set. I completely believe this. It feels very much like watching something happen for real, and Craven's decision to shot the movie documentary-style really pays off. Even the constant cutaways to two painfully unfunny comic relief country policemen can't break the tone.
The end of the movie, where the parents take revenge, doesn't have the same feeling of authenticity as the earlier sequences, though it certainly doesn't stint on savagery. Craven makes his points obviously enough - the violence degrades everybody involved, that retribution can be as bad as the inital crime - but the emotional involvement is not as high.
The local DVD has a documentary called Celluloid Crime of the Century, and reveals that the movie was originally intended as hardcore pornography. A very brief but very shocking passage from Craven's original screenplay is flashed on the screen- I won't describe it here, but I will say that it's no wonder the actors refused to go through with this stuff despite some of them being hardcore veterans.
I could not say that I enjoyed Last House on the Left. I could not in all conscience recommend it. But I believe it is a powerful and important piece of film, and that it occupies a vital place in world cinema history. It has certainly been influential, as have the careers of its principal crew. Watch it if you're intruiged, but not on a date. Yuck. Save that for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.
Posted by pearce at March 10, 2005 11:58 PM