In 1971 a young filmmaker by the name of Sean S. Cunningham was working on a movie called Together, which in turn was a remake of his "white coater" film The Art of Marriage. While working on Together, Cunningham met Wes Craven, who was working as an editor on the film, and the two became friends. When Cunningham was given $90,000 to make a "scary movie" by his distributors, the two decided to work together on it, with Craven directing. The movie that came out of this was The Last House on the Left.
Mari Collingwood is celebrating her 17th birthday. Her parents are planning a birthday party for her, but Mari is also going to see a band called Bloodlust with her friend Phyllis. Her parents disapprove, but let her go anyway. Unfortunately, the girls never make it to the concert - whilst trying awkwardly to buy some pot, they fall into the clutches of the recently-escaped Krug Stillo and the rest of his gang: child molester Fred; Sadie, who once kicked a police dog to death; and Junior, Krug's son whom Krug got addicted to heroin so as to control him better. Mari and Phyllis are subjected to a never-ending torrent of abuse, assault, humiliation and rape, it all climaxing in the woods just a few hundred yards from Mari's home, where her parents are putting the finishing touches on her birthday cake and waiting for her to come home...
"To avoid fainting, keep repeating: it's only a movie... only a movie... only a movie..." screamed the marketing for The Last House on the Left, because they knew that audiences would not have seen anything like this before. The film was loosely based on Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, which in turn was based on a Swedish ballad: but this movie is no fairy tale or piece of beautiful cinematography. Craven's directorial debut is an uncomfortable and grimy exploitation horror film that sets out to make its audience squirm in their seats as they watch its depictions of rape, violence and murder, as well as comparing the polar extremes of Krug and his gang's cruel and animalistic natures with the liberal, civilised world of the Collingwoods, especially as we can see how they're fated to collide. It's a concept that Craven came back to several times during his career - the liberal, suburban family coming up against feral murderers - in films like The Hills Have Eyes and The People Under the Stairs, albeit from different angles.
With it being Craven's first film, there are of course some flaws to it. Chief among them is the way that Krug and Company (one of the film's alternate titles) are portrayed - they're just too over-the-top in their evilness. You've got a child molester and murderer; a woman so mean she kicked a police dog to death; a heroin junkie who was hooked on the stuff by his own father (unsurprisingly, he's the most sympathetic of the four); and Krug himself... a rapist and serial killer, recently escaped from prison, and the first time we see him he pops a child's balloon with a cigar. We get it movie, they're bad people! In an attempt to contrast the villains with the peaceful, "good" Collingwoods, the film goes too far, and has them become caricatures rather than believable antagonists. It also jars with the moment of almost-guilt they seem to have after committing one of their atrocities. Another flaw of the film is the inclusion of the two bumbling comic relief police officers, complete with their own comedy sound track. Not only do most of their scenes stick out awkwardly against the rest of the film, but they could be easily removed and the film would lose very little of importance.
In The Last House on the Left, Krug is played by David Hess, and to say they he ended up being a bit typecast in film and TV afterwards is a bit of an understatement. He later starred in films such as The House on the Edge of the Park, where he plays pretty much the same character as here, and other films like Hitch Hike and various TV shows, where he nearly always played the villain of the episode. Hess also did the score for The Last House on the Left, and while I could live without the bumbling cops' theme his other tracks, such as the haunting The Road Leads to Nowhere, are very good indeed.
Of course, you can't talk about The Last House on the Left without mentioning its video nasty status. It was of course one of the 72 films caught up in the UK moral panic of the early 1980s, and was also one of the last to finally get a fully uncut re-release in 2008. In fact, when it was up for approval by the BBFC in 2002 film critic Mark Kermode spoke in its defense in an appeal to get 16 seconds of cuts waived, talking of the film's historical significance. Afterwards the BBFC made it 30 seconds of cuts instead. The Last House on the Left is a brutal, unflinching and unpleasant film to watch, because Craven and Cunningham set out to make a film where the violence and gore was as realistic and uncomfortable to watch as possible. the fact that the film garnered so much controversy and for so long is a mark of their success in that. It's certainly not a film for everyone, but for horror fans, those interested in the history of the genre or in the video nasties phenomenon, it's pretty much required viewing.
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