THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT

As regular reader of this blog might recall, I recently had the opportunity to view Ingmar Bergman's 1960 film, THE VIRGIN SPRING. I noted in my review that the film served as an inspiration for Wes Craven's THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972), which was, more or less, a remake of Bergman's rape and revenge drama.

I've now watched for the first time, LAST HOUSE and found it to be a genuinely unpleasant experience. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm a monster kid through and through. Grew up on a steady diet of horror films. Love 'em. But LAST HOUSE was such an utterly pointless exercise in depravity that I find it hard to say hardly anything good about it.

The plot parallels Bergman's film (more or less). Here, instead of one young woman, there are two victims and instead of  two men and a boy, there are now three men and a woman who are the murderers. There's rape and murder in the woods and revenge at the hands of one of the dead girls' parents (they both get in on the action) and instead of medieval implements like swords and axes, here the parents attack with a variety of weapons including shotguns, electrified doors and a chainsaw.

The first use of a chainsaw as a weapon in the cinema was in the great B movie DARK OF THE SUN (1968) and later made infamous in Tobe Hooper's masterpiece THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974), another film of unrelieved brutality as is LAST HOUSE, but one which I actually find contains a tremendous amount of merit, a film well deserving of its' status as a true classic of the American horror cinema.

LAST HOUSE has echoes of both Sam Peckinpah's STRAW DOGS (1971) and the similar rape-in-the-woods sequence of DELIVERANCE (1972)  but Craven's depiction of the ordeal is much longer, more graphic and more depraved than anything seen in American mainstream films to that time.

The film is grainy, cheap looking (made on a budget of $87,000) and the entire cast is comprised of unknown New York area actors. This actually works to the film's advantage because if Craven had cast recognizable actors in any of the parts, that presence would have served to detract from the icky verisimilitude of the whole affair. 

There's comic relief in the form of two bumbling and ineffectual cops and several scenes are scored with off kilter rinky tinky music (by David Alexander Hess) that seems more at home at a Shakey's pizza parlor than a horror film.

Still, the film packs an unmistakable wallop. It was extremely controversial upon first release and was heavily censored in some markets (some foreign countries banned the film entirely). The result was a  box office bonanza, earning more than $3 million dollars domestically. That's quite a return on an investment that is strictly grindhouse fodder.

LAST HOUSE made Craven a creative force to reckon with and he went on to make bigger budget (and much better) films including THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977), DEADLY BLESSING (1981), SWAMP THING (1982), THE HILLS HAVE EYES PART II (1984) and his most iconic film (and franchise starter) A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984).

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT is not for everyone but as a devoted horror film fan, it's a film I thought I really should see. I'm glad to have seen it. Now I know what all the fuss is about. It's an important, groundbreaking film of the horror cinema of the '70s but I have no desire to ever watch it again.