‘To avoid fainting, keep repeating, ‘It’s only a movie … Only a movie … Only a movie …’
There was a time when I would seek out films like The Last House on the Left. The list of extreme cinema that I watched as a younger man will be familiar to anyone with similar ghoulish tastes. The Human Centipede. Driller Killer. Martyrs. Irreversible. Everyone knows the greatest hits. The Last House on the Left is another big hitter of extreme cinema and it launched (and almost immediately torpedoed) the career of a young director named Wes Craven…
On her 17th birthday, Mari (Sandra Peabody) and her friend Phyllis (Lucy Grantham) head to the wrong side of the tracks looking for some action. Upon arrival, they are quickly picked up by a gang of degenerates led by the murderous and sadistic Krug (David Hess) along with his junkie son Junior (Marc Sheffler), the knife-wielding Weasel (Fred J. Lincoln) and animalistic gangster’s moll Sadie (Jeramie Rain). All the while, Mari’s doting parents and a pair of bumbling cops try to find the missing girls.
The Last House on the Left started life as a porn flick and it still retains that grimy, amateur aesthetic. The violence, Craven’s response to the contrast between horrifying images of the Vietnam War that featured on the news every night and what he saw as the glorification of violence in TV shows and movies, is both brutal and frantic. This is not an enjoyable film. Indeed, I only rewatched it here as The Evolution of Horror podcast had devoted an episode to it. That being said, there are some genuinely haunting and memorable sequences, mainly in the first half, and if Craven set out to shock and appal, he certainly did that here with a movie that wouldn’t be released uncut in the UK until 2008. We are talking about a film where a man has his penis bitten off and a woman faces the ordeal of having the antagonist’s name painstakingly scratched into her skin. Fun.
Craven’s directorial debut is an unflinching nihilistic cultural touchstone that stands alongside The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and A Clockwork Orange as a trio of movies that helped to usher in the darker side of New Hollywood. It remains a shocking and sad film all these years later.