Rating: * or *** depending on your tastes
With all the hoopla surrounding Wes Craven and his success with SCREAM and SCREAM 2, I thought I'd take a stroll down memory lane into the past endeavours of Mr. Craven. So why not start at the beginning? His first, and still most controversial film, is LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. A revenge tale which is oh, so 70s, this film is pretty much hated by most of the critical and sane world. However, it is interesting to note that Roger Ebert, a critic which I really admire, loved it and highly recommends the film. My conclusions were somewhat mixed, but let me tell you a bit about its sick plot first.
A gang of misfits is "on the loose" after having broken out of prison. They were initially arrested for murder, rape, and all that good stuff. At the same time that they are hiding out in the city, a pair of nice teenage girls from the country come into the big city for a rock concert. These two are fooled into believing the gang members (consisting of a father and son, another bad dude, and his woman) are drug dealers. This misconception leads to the gang kidnapping the two girls. Of course, we are meant to sympathize with the predicament of these two girls, even they are incredibly stupid and fall for the most transparent of schemes.
The gang then escapes into the country with the two teenagers in tow. After their car breaks down, they hide out in a forest, where they rape, abuse, and do other assorted terrible deeds to the two girls. These are quite degrading, culminating in the forcing of one girl to wet her pants. A failed escape attempt leads to the death of one girl, and the second, named Amy, is subsequently raped. This leaves Amy in such a daze that she attempts to drown herself in a creek. The gang members, however, shoot her dead before she can successfully commit suicide.
After this half of the movie is complete, the gang members then are welcomed as guests at the house of a nice, middle-aged couple who believe the gang's car brokedown nearby. Here's the twist: the couple is worried about their missing daughter Amy. Yes, you got it, the same Amy who was killed by the gang. The couple figures out the truth fairly quickly, and then it's time for revenge, which comes in various fun and nasty ways. My favorite was the oral castration.
This is, in fact, a poor film. It sounds like a good revenge/horror flick, but it's not. There are two small things preventing it from being good: a lack of anyone who can act and a lack of a budget. The movie looks terrible, the acting is execrable, the folky/70s rock music is annoying, and the film has no sense of timing. There are these random scenes of two cops continually inserted to lengthen the film to its whopping running time of 82 minutes. For anyone who appreciates quality, this movie gets one star.
However, there is something kind of fun about LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT that I must acknowledge. The film is so ridiculously 70s, that it's almost funny. The editing, filming, acting, and music is so bad that it becomes enjoyably trippy. Far be it from me to to espouse drug use, however, let's just say if you lined up to see "Half-Baked" or "Dazed and Confused" on opening night, you might frequently find yourself in a condition which might make this movie fun. Also, there's a sort of sick pleasure in watching the revenge take place. For this kind of person, the film gets three stars. All in all, however, unless you're a weird freak or a pothead, I cannot recommend LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. Rating: * star or *** stars, depending on you (out of a possible 4)
