The House on the Edge of the Park (or The House of the Park on the Edge, if you take the mis-edited title from the trailer) was one of the films to fall afowl of the "video nasties" purge in the UK in the early 1980s, and was in fact banned until 2002, when it was finally released with nearly 12 minutes of cuts. In 2011 the BBFC waived most of those cuts (leaving only about 42 seconds of cuts to one particular scene), but it is of course my luck to get hold of the heavily-cut version for this review. Ah well. At least I know what's been cut out and how it relates to the plot.
The film starts with Alex, played by David Hess (hired for the movie on the strength of his performance in Last House on the Left; the filmmakers wanted him in the film so badly that they gave him half the rights to the film) running a car off the road and then raping and strangling its female driver. He takes her locket as a 'trophy' of the event. Some indeterminate time later Alex and his friend Ricky (who is described as somewhat mentally challenged) are preparing to shut up their garage and go out partying when a couple drive up in their expensive car and ask for help fixing it. Ricky managed to fix their problem easily and Alex then manages to get the two of them invited along to the party that the rich couple are going to.
At the "party" it quickly becomes clear to Alex that the rich people there are only out to have fun at the expense of their less-well-off party guests. Ricky is their target for the majority of this, as they persuade him to get drunk and do a striptease for them, then proceed to fleece him in a crooked poker game. Alex eventually puts a stop to this, after being teased to the point of blue balls by one of the women there, and he then proceeds to turn the tables on his rich "hosts" and their friends. The rest of the film is then the various ways Alex and Ricky (mostly Alex, really) abuse, torture and rape the guests, including the film's most infamous scene where Alex uses a straight razor to slice up a naked teenage girl who happened to turn up at the house at the wrong time (The BBFC of course removed nearly every moment of this scene, save for a few facial reaction shots of Alex and Cindy, his victim, leaving the average viewer completely in the dark as to what is going on. He could be tickling the soles of her feet to the point of pain for all we know).
It is easy to see how the film fell afoul of the video nasties panic; sexualised violence has always been a bannable theme for the BBFC, and the obvious pleasure that Alex gets from his straight razor assault on Cindy alone would probably have been enough on its own. Add in the several sexual assaults and rapes throughout the film, and the dubious reactions of at least one of the victims to it, and I guess you do have a problematic film. Of course, there's a reason for the latter which we discover at the end, but all that does is add weight to Alex's repeated assertions through the film that the "rich people" don't feel things like he and Ricky do; they don't value friendships or each other the same way. (Some people have read a homoerotic subtext into Alex and Ricky's relationship; I leave it up to the individual to make their own decision after seeing the film.) But certainly by the end of the film, no-one comes off as a particularly nice person - Alex is obviously the villain of the piece, but nearly everyone else is morally dubious as well, willing to let innocent people suffer for their own ends. It can certainly be a difficult film to watch, if nothing else.
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