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The Last House on the Left
Catterall
This one comes with more baggage than the carousel at Heathrow Terminal Five. Last House On The Left is a remake of a remake of Ingmar Bergman's 1959 Oscar-winner The Virgin Spring, itself an adaptation of 'Töres Dotter I Wänge', a medieval Swedish folk ballad of child murder and parental retribution. It possibly goes without saying that the Bergman film is about as funny as a burning Punch & Judy booth. Wes Craven's unofficial 'remake' of The Virgin Spring is even less amusing than that. And this 2009 version makes you want to throw in your lot with a doomsday cult.
In Last House '2.0', Mari Collingwood (Sara Paxton) and her girlfriend Paige (Martha MacIsaac) are looking, in time-honoured fashion, to score some reefer when they stumble on a delightful bunch of escaped sex killers led by Krug (Garret Dillahunt), who tortures and murders Paige, and rapes and leaves Mari for dead in the woods. Later, during a storm, Krug and company seek first aid and shelter at the nearest house which, by an amazing coincidence, just happens to be Mari's eponymous home. Her surgeon parents patch them up and put them up - until they learn the truth. Hippocratic oaths may yet be broken...
Plot-wise, this reboot isn't too dissimilar from its predecessors (discounting a tawdry 2005 knock-off called Chaos). But tonally, it's as distinct from its immediate forebear as that film is from The Virgin Spring. Bergman's bleakly powerful work highlights the tensions between deep-rooted paganism and the younger Christian religion, as Max Von Sydow's devout Catholic demonstrably fails to turn the other cheek after discovering that the huntsmen he's sheltering have previously raped and murdered his virginal churchgoing daughter. Jettisoning all theology, Craven's spin on it simply offers the blunt message that violence degrades everybody and that a switchblade in the kidneys begets a chainsaw in the face.
Craven's notorious debut is among a select bunch of movies, such as 1974's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, that critics and cult movie aficionados revere like the Dead Sea Scrolls of horror. Some have called it "rough around the edges", which is putting it politely. It's terrible. From its tension-diluting cutaways to its comedy cops and hillbilly score, it's one of the most perverse, cack-handed horrors ever made, even for a zero-budget exploitation flick. Craven has described how outraged audiences tried to bust into the projection room to attack the negative with scissors. Possibly, they were merely trying to edit it properly.
So, while Last House 2009 is not a great film, or even a good film, if movies were judged purely on technical merit, this would bat its ancestor right out of the ballpark. And yet Version 1, where grindhouse meets arthouse, remains infinitely more interesting. In depicting realistic Manson-style murder, rape, torture and intestine-removal, former university professor Craven and producer Sean S Cunningham (creator of Friday The 13th, another significant addition to the slasher subgenre) "set out to show violence the way we thought it really was", to take "all the B-movie conventions and stand them on their head" as Craven put it. The result was a hugely influential, censor-baiting wake-up call to a nation numbed and desensitized by the Vietnam War.
Yet if Wes Craven's freakish, warts-and-all experiment is a product of the counter-culture, this year's model, lacking any meaningful context of its own, is the exact opposite: reactionary, conservative - existing purely as a slick commercial venture, more grisly grist to the multiplex mill. If Craven's original wielded a rusty dagger, this version comes at you with a laser beam. And with its overly familiar scenes of limbs in the waste disposal unit, topless Hell-queens, and WWE-style smackdowns between heroes and villains, this cannot hope to have the same impact on today's audiences, as desensitized in their own way from a legacy of instantly accessed horror, fictional and real.
Perhaps the most telling statement is to be found in the film's own press release: "There was never any question as to whether The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe designers would create the special effects makeup for The Last House On The Left..."
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