THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972)Directed by Wes Craven
Starring Sandra Cassell, Lucy Grantham, David A. Hess, Fred Lincoln, Jeramie Rain, Marc Sheffler, Cynthia Carr, Gaylord St. James
X for unspecified reasons (contains sadistic brutal violence including rape, and some strong sexuality, nudity, drug use and language).
SCAREmeter: 4/10
GOREmeter: 8.5/10
OVERALL: 1.5 out of 4 stars
The highly-influential 1972 horror classic and feature film-debut for horror maven Wes Craven (that rhymed, unintentional), THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, reminds of an episode of the popular Comedy Central animated series South Park, or rather, the effects of the film and its cultural standing remind me of this South Park episode. It's Episode 2, Season 14, titled The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs. In this episode, the South Park lads are assigned to read J.D. Salinger's literary classic, The Catcher in the Rye, and when the teacher cautions them about its controversial history, the boys are all compelled to actually read the book. When they read it, they're disappointed to find it not at all as filthy has they had hoped, so they decide to write their own book, the filthiest, trashiest book ever written, called The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs. When Stan's parents find the manuscript, the boys panic and blame it all on the class putz, Leopold "Butters" Scotch, but once the adults in the small Colorado town can stop vomiting after reading the disgusting book, they all hail it as a literary masterpiece, akin to The Catcher in the Rye, applying ludicrous new depth to the outrageously vulgar story and praising its alleged insight.
Similarly, THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT is frequently interpreted as a highly important commentary on the contemporary politics of the Vietnam War and corresponding media coverage, and a landmark in film, but mostly, it's a nauseating showcase of abhorrent criminality and cruelty made on a miniscule budget by a talented but obviously novice director, barely suited even for exhibition in the seediest 1970s grindhouse theater. Still, it's "important."
Mari Collingwood (Sandra Cassell), the virginal daughter of upper-crust liberals, is celebrating her seventeenth birthday by going to a concert with her disreputable friend, Phyllis Stone (Lucy Grantham). As the pair of teenage girls drive to the city, a news broadcast reporting on recent prison escape involving the sadistic murderer/rapist Krug Stillo (David A. Hess), murdering child molester Fred "Weasel" Podowski and their promiscuous cohort/lover Sadie (Jeramie Rain), and the disappearance of Krug's son, Junior (Marc Sheffler). Mari and Phyllis stop to buy some marijuana before the concert and and wind up captives of Krug's gang when they try to buy from the wrong person, and Phyllis is gang-raped in their seedy apartment.
The next day, Krug's gang take the captive teen girls out to the woods in their car, where they run out of gas nearby Mari's house, and take the girls into the woods on foot, where they proceed to force them to perform humiliating acts, primarily sexual in nature, and rape them brutally, before stabbing Phyllis to death and disemboweling and dismembering her body, and Krug carves his name into Mari's chest and shoots her to death, leaving her body in a lake.
After satisfying themselves of sadistic carnage, Krug and Company change out of their bloody clothes and head over to the Collingwood home to seek assistance, masquerading as a traveling sales team. It isn't long before they realize that this is the family home of one of the girls they just brutalized and murdered, some of them even granted permission to stay the night in Mari's bedroom, while Mr. and Mrs. Collingwood tentatively assume that she must have stayed over with Phyllis. Their suspicions are aroused though when they notice what appears to be a piece of Mari's jewelry around Junior's neck, anf their suspicions are confirmed when they overhear a conversation between the murderers that leads them to discover their daughter's mangled body in the lake. From here, the movie takes a reverse but equally violent turn, as the parents dole out sadistically violent revenge on Krug, Junior, Sadie and Weasel.
The entire film is also interwoven with scenes of dopey slapstick, too, accompanied by a "Keystone Cops" soundtrack, and one of the major subplots involves some Keystone-esque cops in pursuit of the escaped criminals, just in case the sadistic violence didn't leave a bad enough taste in your mouth.
Although it's a horror movie, it is an early example of such a film that is not interested in scaring its audience as it is in disgusting them; it is the classic example of a film which assaults its audience. It is a film as sadistic as its characters (albeit expressed in the significantly less harmful method of "artistic" cynicism as opposed to rape and murder). It was famously marketed with a previously-used tagline that nonetheless became iconically associated with THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT; "To avoid fainting, keep repeating, 'It's only a movie'...". It's not too hard to forget it's "only a movie" though, even if it is a disgusting movie. It's a markedly shoddy production, not merely due to its paltry budget either. It is the work of a novice, written and directed by first-timer Wes Craven and produced by Sean Cunningham, the two of whom met when Craven helped to edit one of the couple of pornographic movies directed by Cunningham. There's not an ounce of polish to the production, shot on grainy stock with poorly recorded audio, like a bunch of friends found an old video camera at a pawn shop and decided have an X-rated gross-out competition. As a matter of fact, the film was initially intended to be a hardcore movie, before the decision was made to soften it for stronger commercial value. Low and behold, the film was a commercial success, showing up in more than just the musty grindhouses where someone practically had to be wearing a trenchcoat to get inside. It was also a critical success, albeit only slightly, and very divisively.
It has been censored in most countries, and was infamously banned in the United Kingdom on and off by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), and figured prominently into the "video nasty" scare in the UK that accompanied new home video technology which made previously restricted film more available to homes with children. In 2002, the BBFC finally allowed for the release of a cut wherein 31 seconds had been removed, still garnering the most restrictive '18' rating, and it wasn't until 2008 that an uncut version of the film was granted a classification.
Much has been made of the historical context of the film, made against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, which first brought the graphic images of war and depravity into the American home by way of the television news. Craven has said that with THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT he had hoped to "re-sensitize" audiences to violence, and it's certainly difficult to justify a viewer who is not turned off by the violence in the film. The film intends to "re-humanize" the viewer by dehumanizing its subjects to an unbearable degree. The film's role in bringing explicit, in-your-face violence into horror and being successful while doing it has made it an oft-referenced landmark of the genre, but the political subtext and cultural importance that is constantly assigned to it seems to suggest an overt attempt by viewers to justify their own inability to look away. It is a textbook case of Scrotie McBoogerballs.
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