The Last House on the Left (

1972

) ½

The late 60s and early 70s were years of disillusionment for America. The war in Vietnam, so hated by the generation called upon to fight it, ground on with no end in sight despite that fact that the public had largely abandoned any hope of victory after the 1968 Tet offensive. The near-daily reports of brutalities and defeats battered against the myths of American morality and invincibility. Richard Nixon, a figure seen by many people as a veritable anti-Christ had not only been elected president but had won a second term in a stunning landslide that saw him capture the electoral votes of every state save Massachusetts. The much-touted love generation had shown an undercurrent of horrific violence as the Altamont Free Concert turned into a riot, hippie cult leader Charlie Manson ordered his followers to commit wanton acts of brutality, and various radical left terrorist groups emerged. From every corner could be heard the cries that America had lost her way. It was also a time of personal disillusionment for director Wes Craven, who had long railed against the strict confines of his devoutly religious upbringing. By 1972, Craven was certainly no choir boy (he had been working in the adult film industry for years) but he had yet to vent the ugly emotions still brewing inside him, as he had no real outlet. That outlet would come in the form of today's film, a singularly nasty and brutal horror film that would go down in infamy. The Last House on the Left is brutish howl, as cruel and nasty as it is incompetently-made; yet despite its obvious shortcomings, the film-lingers on in the viewers' minds.

Mari Collingwood plans to celebrate her 17th birthday by going into New York City and seeing a ludicrously-named heavy metal band “Bloodlust” with her best friend Phyllis Stone. Mari's parents, Estelle and Dr. John Collingwood aren't happy about the band (who are said to ritually sacrifice chickens during their performances) or about Phyllis (who is from the wrong side of the tracks). Still, despite their misgivings they simply cannot help but indulge their daughter for her birthday, after all how many times do you turn 17? Unbeknownst to them, but announced to the audience via an exposition dump over the radio, a pair of vicious criminals, named Weasel and Krug, have just been sprung from prison by Krug's son Junior and his mistress Sadie. It should come as no surprise then, that within the vast concrete expanse of NYC, Mari and Phyllis immediately stumble upon the crooks who are trying to lie-low. In a singularly bad decision they try to buy some weed off of Junior, who leads the pair upstairs into the hands of Krug and the rest of the thugs. Krug's plan was to quietly slip out of town, but he's the kind of guy who is always adapting to changing circumstances. Getting out of town with a pair of hostages/victims sounds great to him. Just what he has planned for the two girls becomes immediately apparent once the gang strips and gang rapes Phyllis while Mari looks on in horror (well, at least that's what's suppose to be happening, the actress playing Mari has trouble articulating mute horror and gets by with conveying exasperated annoyance).

Come morning the gang shoves their two prisoners into the trunk of the car and drives north, just far enough to get within spitting distance of Mari's house, before the car breaks down on the side of the road. When the gang can't fix the car they decide on an impromptu hike in the woods. Up until this point, the film has been rather mild by early 70s exploitation standards there's some tits here and there and some implied atrocities happening, mainly off-camera, but nothing the grindhouse set hasn't seen before. If you were expecting to be shocked and scandalized by this film, worry not, because this is the point at which The Last House on the Left starts to get really nasty. Once they are deep in the woods, Krug forces the two girls at knifepoint to hit each other and soil themselves. Then at the suggestion of Junior, whose worried that Krug will kill somebody if he keeps going the way he's going, Krug forces the two girls to have sex with each other. Make no mistake, this sequence would be an unusually grotesque scene in any time and place but for early 1970s America this was so far beyond the pale of what was socially acceptable than it was downright alarming. Had Wes Craven been a Cat III director in the early 1990s or an Italian filmmaker in the late 1970s this stuff would be, while not tame, at least not surprising. To get the full effect you have to bear in mind, that at this point in American history the most shocking and disturbing movies were Rosemary's Baby (1968) and Night of the Living Dead (1968)!

Perhaps this is why Craven saw fit to inter-cut the footage of various atrocities with an excretable comic-relief subplot. Now, comic relief in horror movies has a long tradition of being obnoxious that dates back to The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Personally, I find it tolerable when the monster is nothing more menacing than Bela Lugosi with some fake teeth and hair-gel, but it really seems out of place when dealing put side-by-side with sexual assault and torture. I understand Craven's intent, which is to contrast the horrors unfolding with the goofiness of the comic scenes and thus amplify their effect, but it just doesn't work. Part of it is the fact that the comic relief scenes just aren't funny. Indeed, only once of these humorous scenes elicited a laugh from me and I'm sure it was unintentional. A pair of clueless cops are rushing back to the Collingwood's house to apprehend Krug and his gang, only to have their squad car run out of gas almost immediately. They try to hitch a ride from a passing car, which slows down only long enough to get their hopes off only to speed up as the kids inside flip off the cops and laugh. Then, one of the passengers, I can only imagine him as an especially big and dumb teenager, shouts out “We hate cops!” Just imagining the sort of good-natured dullard who would shout that out, presumably while trying to curry favor with his marginally more intelligent friends is, to me at least, hysterical.

But the comic relief seems like a brilliant idea when contrasted with the absolute idiocy that is the film's soundtrack. This is a film calling out for a realistic/minimalist score, something that will increase the viewer's immersion in the film, and make them feel deeply unsettled by the horrors on screen. Ideally it would be silent save for the rustle of leaves, the sobs of the victims, and the occasional synthetic tone at every twist of the knife. Instead we get goofy folk/rock tunes that feel wildly out-of-place. Now I could understand a bad soundtrack were Craven limited to whatever royalty-free music he could scrounge up; Lord knows this was a low budget film. Yet much of the music was composed for the film and even references characters and events in the lyrics. How is it possible that no one thought it was a bad idea to incorporate a kazoo into the soundtrack of a horror movie?

The acting is, with one exception, dreadful. Part of the problem is the grandness of the emotions the poor non-professional actors are called upon to display. This is no slice-of-life, slow-burning domestic drama from which the actors could draw on their life experience to add a layer of authenticity. The characters and emotions are huge and operatic, closer in content to a Greek tragedy or a Shakespeare play than anything they would have lived through. Of the entire cast, only David Hess playing Krug is at all convincing in his role. Sure, he does not look like a menacing psychopath, but he sure as hell can act like one. Tellingly, he would be called upon by other exploitation filmmakers to play said role a couple more times, most notably in House on the Edge of the Park (1980) and Hitch-hike (1977). The acting of Sandra Peabody, who plays Mari, improved dramatically once the extended sequence in the woods began, though I suspect that the methods used to motivate her were not exactly moral. Hess, who remained constantly in character reportedly threatened to rape and murder her off-camera, and even Craven admitted later on that there probably wasn't much acting in her performance during this sequence. It was fair enough for Peabody to be afraid, here she was working in the middle of the woods with a bunch of weirdos who were filming without permits. Under those circumstances I would probably worry that I had accidentally found myself cast as the lead in a snuff film too.

Obviously, I denounce such filmmaking methods; a viewer should be able to walk into a horror movie without having the worry about any ethical considerations of the wanton cruelty onscreen. If the means by which The Last House on the Left were made mean you cannot in good conscious watch the film, I don't think any less of you for it. Yet for me, to simply denounce the film because of these ethical considerations would be letting myself off too easy. There's something more deeply disturbing about The Last House on the Left, that's harder to articulate than any consideration of the filmmaker's methodology. It's in the perverse imagination of the filmmaker, and the willingness of Craven to make something so deliberately and grotesquely ugly. What's more, Craven's later films, excepting The Hills Have Eyes (1977), are nowhere near as bleak or nihilistic. Indeed, compared to The Last House on the Left they are traditional popcorn movies; at times a bit scary, at times a bit sexy, and almost uniformly entertaining. Maybe it's just the fact that this is a first film, made by someone whose only previous experience was in pornography but to me this does not adequately explain the darkness lurking at the center of the Last House on the Left. It seems as if Craven walked himself to the very brink of a dark abyss and then somehow, turned himself around. How he did it, or how he remained sane after these revelations is beyond me.