Back in 1972, Wes Craven said “How Do” with the cheapest, nastiest horror standard of them all. Depending upon your tolerance for artistic freedom, The Last House On The Left represents either the zenith or the nadir of the ‘70s exploitation cycle. The violence is brutal. The rape scenes leave you scrubbing yourself with Brillo pads in the shower for weeks.
For Mr. Craven this vile assault on the senses was precisely the point. Nothing quite makes a young independent filmmaker stand out from the crowd like a notorious ‘video nasty’.
“To avoid fainting keep repeating ‘It’s only a movie, only a movie, only a movie’…” trumpeted the accompanying poster.
If the film’s reputation has endured it’s because the director’s fellow cineastes are in on not one, but several gags. Last House, remember, is no mere brainless cut-‘em-up but a twisted reworking of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring from the same gentlemen who went on to direct Meryl Streep in Music Of The Heart.
This 2009 remake of a remake has no such hidden depths. Like The Hills Have Eyes, this latest regurgitation from Mr. Craven’s back catalogue is pretty, well, craven. The Last House On The Left, one feels, has no business existing outside the grubby world of exploitation cinema. So it proves.
For anyone who is not familiar with the plot, this studio remake sticks with Bergman’s granddaddy formula for rape and revenge; middle-class parents discover that the bunch of no-good-niks they are sheltering from the storm have raped and brutalised their daughter. Vengeance ensues.
The 2009 version from director Dennis Iliadis can be just as icky as the 1972 original but it never feels quite right. In common with other recent horror franchise retoolings – Hills, Friday the Thirteenth, The Uninvited – the film is competently shot in a naturalistic veneer. Wounds gush with vigour, traumas unfold in real time.
But this sort of material should be the preserve of B-movie junkies looking for a big movie break, not megabucks producers. Only Hollywood could have figured out a way of exploiting the exploitation flick.
Go watch the DVD reissue instead.