The Last House on the Left

Released: 1972

MPAA rating: Unrated

Run time: 1:24

I don't usually review movies that are 37 years old. It sort of seems pointless since, at this point, any one interested will have seen it already. However, this movie's sort of revered cult status made me feel compelled to give it a review. Call this a "Gallagher Classic Review", if you will. Perhaps a new addition to the column. The only problem here is that this movie is far from classic. It is actually a movie I avoided due to its "brutal" reputation. Some of what gives this movie its cult classic status is that it is horror maven Wes Craven's first film and, also, it IS very different. It is shockingly low budget, which actually adds to the discomfort level while watching it. The acting is incredibly bad, led by the mother (Cynthia Carr) and the two "Keystone Cops" from the sherriff's office (Marshall Anker and Martin Kove --who you may remember from "The Karate Kid"). In fact, the two cops were completely unnecessary and wasted characters. They were there to provide some comic relief, but it just didn't do it for me. It just seemed like wasted time. If you are not familiar with the movie, the plot involves two teenage girls (Sandra Peabody and Lucy Grantham) who head into the city for a concert. When they decide to score some pot, they find themselves captured and tormented by a group of escaped convicts. The convicts are incredibly over-the-top evil (but not nearly as effectively as the Firefly family in "The Devil's Rejects"). You have the ringleader, Krug (David Hess), his son Junior (Marc Sheffler), Weasel (Fred J. Lincoln) and Sadie (Jeramie Rain). Their resumes are so silly, it is almost comical. Krug forced his own son to become addicted to heroin so he "could control him for life". Sadie is described as a woman who seems more like a wild animal than a human and Weasel is a "child molester also convicted of assault with a deadly weapon". We hear this as we see Weasel spin the chamber on a revolver. These crimes don't usually reside in the same person. So, you have the two girls being tormented through the night and coincidence finds the group in the woods eerily close to one of the girl's homes. When fate puts the four convicts in the home of the girl, the parents decide to turn the tables and exact their revenge. This is the part that I was looking forward to: A twist on the psycho genre where the "good people" become the torturers for revenge. Unfortunately, it takes way too long to get to this, the revenge methods become silly and it is over too fast. Did ANYTHING about this movie work? Well, some of it did. There are a couple of rape/"forced performance" scenes that are incredibly uncomfortable and definitely disturbing. The blood, for a low budget 1972 horror film, is very realistic (in fact, in Germany, it was "sold" as a rumored snuff film where real murders were filmed). Overall, though, too much silliness was mixed in and the writing was not quite good enough to overcome the very bad production values. In a very rare case, I am actually looking forward to seeing the recent remake to see if they got this right. Wes Craven is a legend and I love several of his films. This was not one of them.

Grade: D+

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