..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

The Last House on the Left
Directed by Dennis Iliades

Once a philosopher, twice a pervert, as Voltaire said -- and as Norman Mailer was fond of quoting.
    
The auteur of Candide never saw the 1972 The Last House on the Left, of course. Or its current slimy sequel. And maybe he hadn’t even read the Marquis de Sade, the biggest French philosopher-pervert of them all, who was 37 when Voltaire died. But one wonders what Voltaire, not to mention De Sade, might have made of Last House on the Left‘s violently sicko-perverted plot, adapted by auteur Wes Craven from auteur Ingmar Bergman.
   
In it, four outlaws on the run kidnap two middle class teen girls who crave some pot. Then, after murdering and/or raping them, the quartet of psychopaths stumbled into the home of one of their victim’s parents, who discover the killers’ identities and wreak a terrifying vengeance.
    
This gory little tale, inspired by Bergman‘s quintessential 1960 Swedish art film, The Virgin Spring, set in medieval times and starring Max Von Sydow, was hammered out, with pungent low budget shockeroo aesthetics, by a cadre of future horror movie luminaries -- including writer-director Craven (Nightmare on Elm Street) and producers Sean Cunningham (Friday the 13th) and Steve Miner (House). It was released as The Last House on the Left back in 1972. (A very good film year, as it happens.) And it was sold with a brilliant ad campaign that advised audiences to keep from fainting by telling themselves “it’s only a movie, it’s only a movie…”
   
Of course, it pales next to De Sade’s Salo. And it is only a movie -- as were those two other paradigm Vietnam era shockers: 1968‘s Night of the Living Dead, and 1974‘s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But there was some excuse for all of them. The young, talented filmmakers who made these movies were working far outside the industry with paltry budgets and no-name actors, and not much more to attract audiences to their shows but lots of shocks and clever ad campaigns. They all modernized, and got more extreme with, what had become zombie and maniac movie clichés. And their success was gauged in generating drive-in horror movie scares and in putting us through the wringer.
     
With the first Last House, Craven also had something new: a frankness about sex, violence and drugs, and a willingness to keep going further. So, when he showed the heroine/victims being tortured and killed (in ways that outraged 1972 feminists and prefigured that nastier and bloodier recent knock-off Chaos), or when they showed the victim’s mother biting down hard while fellating one of the killers, or when the dad went nuts at the end with a chainsaw, there was some novelty. There was even a social context. The killers were white trash, and the victims were suburban bourgeois, and they met in that eerie ‘60-‘70s middle zone of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll that tore down many class barriers in the ‘60s and ‘70s -- including the ones that had separated the Manson family and the Polanski household.
      
But there’s not much novelty in the new House on the Left, and what there is, I would rather have missed. It’s the same damned movie all over again, made with more money, more technical polish and less restraint -- and all that higher polish, spiffier editing and atmospheric shooting just makes it seem cheesier, uglier and less intriguing.
    
New director Dennis Iliadis and his shameless writers, Adam Alleca and Carl Ellsworth, want us to be sure we’re in a horror movie (as if the title weren’t enough) so they start spilling blood right away. They begin with the psychopaths rather than the straight family, knocking off some cops and once again, the filmmakers make the four killers a kind of false parody family: evil dad Krug (Garret Dillahunt), sneaky wicked Uncle Francis (Aaron Paul), sexy bi-girl/killer Sadie (Rikki Lindhome) and Krug’s pothead son (Spencer Treat Clark), who was Junior in the first movie and Justin here.
    
Once again, the girls -- dreamy Mari (Sara Paxton) and party girl Paige (Martha MacIsaac) -- are lured by marijuana, abducted and humiliated. Mari’s real parents -- Tony Goldwyn as John and Monica Potter as Emma -- are even more rich and generous, an athletic-looking doctor and his compassionate wife, who ultimately show us again how ordinary bourgeois can go homicidal.
    
They succeed too well. It’s a really crappy movie, and if I’d rated it based solely on how I felt when I left the theater, I might have been tempted to blackball and no-star it, as I did Chaos. This movie was no pleasure. It looked and felt ugly. In this bloody farrago, the woods are grimy, dark and deep. The lake is set for drowning. There are no chainsaws that I remember, but maybe I was blinded by horror. John has lots of other household implements to slice and stab the killers with, and anyway Tobe Hopper took over that franchise long ago. There is no shortage of other “Saws" slicing away elsewhere.
    
I‘ll admit Iliadis (the Greek director of Hardcore) has talent, and that he held my attention for most of the first half. But what the hell does that matter? “Last House 2009” began to lose me when the parents started whacking away, in scenes obviously intended to goose up audience cheers (which they did.) The original “Last House” disturbed some reviewers because its horror seemed more plausible, more possible. Indeed, critics who attacked that movie sometimes expressed fear that it might become an instruction manual for maniacs. But then, what if people starting using Pasolini‘s film of Salo, as their party-planning video? I‘m more worried that this remake will become an instruction manual for bad, empty moviemaking.
    
The new movie is really a by-the-bloody-numbers affair, repeating the structure of the first Last House, while making the villains somewhat slimier, extending the revenge sequences, and tacking on a foul, idiotic, over-the-top ending. That last gasp, murder by micro-wave oven, plays like something dreamed up by a heavily stoned teen team of gory-minded dorks at a gross-out contest: a stupefying topper for which everyone involved should be ashamed. If I were Craven and Iliadis, I’d cut this stinkeroo last blast off the movie for the DVD release, and run it as a deleted ending. Which it should have been.
    
I guess I can’t blame Craven and Cunningham for returning to their earlier, career-making franchises -- especially since they’ve made their living on franchises for years. And Craven can be a damned good director. Maybe Iliadis is too. But why waste more money on this kill-the-creeps slasher farrago than on thousands of the originals? Calculated tastelessness and wormy gross out contests should probably be left to smashed kids, along with Republican Party economics and other sins of youth. After all, money isn’t everything. Neither are fellatio and chainsaws. (Which, by the way, make a good double metaphor for Republican Party economics.)

-by Michael Wilmington

Home | Movie City News | Contact Us
Report broken links and other web problems to Webmaster.
©2009. Movie City News, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Movie City Geek, Movie City Indie and MCNBlogs are trademarks of Movie City New