The Last House on the Left

There are few delights in life greater than the enjoyment of violence with a clear conscience. Most people have a part of them that yearns to cut a person in half with a band saw, or see someone cut in half with a band saw, but we'd never actually do it. However, if we had a chance to cut a really, really bad guy in half with a band saw, that's a different story. You'd be ridding the world of an evildoer and damn, check out that arterial spray! Movies like The Last House on the Left indulge the audience's desire to watch human bodies suffer horrific damage while still feeling personally virtuous.

The Last House on the Left is the latest vapid, glossy remake of a 70s horror film directed by a eurotrash commercial and music video auteur, in this case Greek helmer Dennis Iliadas. Unlike Marcus Nispel's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this movie is not a desecration of a classic. Wes Craven's 1972 original was a drive-in sensation, mostly because its insanely amateurish execution made some of the violence seem unnervingly realistic. Watching it today, after thirty years of ever-intensifying film violence, the original film plays like a remake of Ingmar Bergman's Virgin Spring (which it is), mixed with Reefer Madness and a bit of Home Alone in the third act, all executed with comic ineptitude. The remake's crime is not ruining the legacy of a cinematic triumph, but of grinding out a by-the-numbers hackathon with no greater ambition than providing gross-out gags, and still failing to clear that very low bar.

The plot is pretty much identical to the original: a young woman leaves her upscale family's lake house to hang out with a friend, the friend takes her to buy pot from people who turn out to be a band of murderous drifters, said drifters torture and leave them for dead before unknowingly seeking shelter a the home of the young woman's parents.  The parents find out who they have in their house and set out seeking blood-drenched revenge.  All of the violence and torture is meant to titillate, with the torture of the innocent girls serving the added purpose of making the audience's enjoyment of their tormentor's deaths that much more unambiguously pleasurable to watch.  The majority of the action is uninspired even by the low standards of the genre, but the whole dismal spectacle is nearly redeemed by a deliriously over-the-top ending that provides the film's only real surprise, and hints at a different direction Iladias and company could have gone.  As it stands, The Last House on the Left, devoid as it is of anything remotely scary, relies entirely on violence to hold the viewer's attention, but still manages to pull punches and go down like cinematic oatmeal.