Well, I decided to tackle the other big video nasty from the pile whilst I was at it. Tackling Cannibal Holocaust actually did generate a bunch of donations (is that what it takes to make you give, MY SUFFERING?!?), so might as well see if I can go for a double. It's the film that I think more than any other personified the sheer brutality of US exploitation cinema at the time, really got the ball rolling on quite a few other horror projects later in the decade, and had one of the best movie taglines of all time, which you can see in that trailer below... pity then it's such utter shite (oh, Spoiler for the review I guess). It's 1972's The Last House on the Left.
Really short summary; there's a quartet of terrible criminals who brutalize, rape, and murder two teenage girls, then they hide out at the home of one of the girls' parents, who find out what happened, and respond by murdering the criminals. That's pretty much it, it actually uses the same plotline as The Virgin Spring, a film by Ingmar Bergman, which in turn was based on a Swedish folk ballad, just transplanted to modern America. It's the sort of smarter inspiration that someone like director Wes Craven would often use; he also based one of the film's most successful images, of the murdered Mari in a lake upon John Everett Millais' portrait of Ophelia. Like Cannibal Holocaust, it's a film that has a brain in its head, wants to be about more than just sheer violence and such, and ask a "who are the real monsters here?" tale. And like CH, it manages to botch making that point very badly.
Craven said in later interviews that he wanted to go for a pure, unflinching view of violence, do it documentary style (something that the film's extra grainy 16mm filmstock certainly fits). He certainly did try to do that with the scenes of brutality, lingering on the incredibly hard-to-watch scenes of violence and sexual assault, they are incredibly hard to watch. The thing is though, this method actually hurts the film, because they go on for so damn long, go so damn far, it's too damn much, just alienating for most of the audience. Frankly, it gets greedy, it doesn't know when to stop and just imply the violence from that point. It's only towards the end there's are moments when I went "Oh, now you show restraint" (although it's clear that they're only done like that to save on the special effects budget).
Two other things really hurt that documentary feel I mentioned; the music and editing. For the former... well, below is an actual song from the soundtrack, written by star David Hess. Just listen to it, and be aware that it's a hilarious hillbilly ballad about the quartet of rapist murderers from this film. Yeah, this sets the mood perfectly.
For the editing, during the whole rape/torture/murder segment, Craven keeps cutting away to a pair of local sheriffs getting into "wacky" hijinks trying to get to the house, even going so far as to have a whole skit involving them trying to hitch a ride with a local farmer right after the murder! I honestly couldn't believe what I was seeing any time these two yahoos showed up! It's so jarring considering the main plot. Craven was right that given a story like this, you need the odd palette cleanser to help the audience get their breath back, but Keystone Kop antics set against a rape/murder story, dropped in whilst said rape/murder is happening? Also, I know, social critique, showing mistrust of authority and not trusting the police, but again, this? I know that all directors have to make a start somewhere, and they do develop with time, but I honestly cannot believe that the director who would make masterful works like A Nightmare on Elm Street, The People Under the Stairs, New Nightmare, and Scream, started out this damn clumsy! The end credits have that hillbilly music again, with shots of the cast with their names, so it literally ends like Dad's Army's "You Have Been Watching"; all that's missing to have it be complete is a laugh track from a BBC sitcom audience.
The film really wants to be this whole statement about a normal family going to brutal lengths in revenge, so here's a question; how long do you think the film would spend on them coming to terms with parents discovering what happened to their little girl, before making themselves ready to get revenge? Whatever you guessed, it's too long, as their decision to murder her killers happens in between scenes! The film takes no time at all to show them coming to this decision, it's finding the body in one shot, going to find the shotgun the next. Honestly, you can spend so long draaaagggggginnnnnngggg out the rapes/murders, and have too many scenes with Sheriff Dimwit and Deputy Dumbass, but the thing that should be the main emotional core of the movie HAPPENS OFF SCREEN?? Well OK, they have like about eight seconds of grieving, but still! Oh yeah, and I have no idea why the mother decided to use the exact murder method she did, when she had a whole house full of pointy things she could have just used instead!
Look, Last House is often held up as this major moment for the horror genre, and I get it, it certainly broke a lot of ground in terms of onscreen violence, and it got a director who would later do great things his foot in the door, but it is just not worth the watch these days, and I question if it ever was. You can see the early germs of later, more well rounded Wes Craven productions in here; his love of MacGyver-ed booby traps appears in here, the whole "civilized family vs. savages" thing he'd do way better in The Hills Have Eyes, and with the leader of the criminals, Krug, Wes would later use a variant of that name for a far more well-remembered horror villain. So I might say it's worth watching to see an earlier point in a noted creator's career when the seeds of these ideas were sown... but I won't, as that would be a lie, it's not worth it. Skip it, and if you can, make my sitting through it worth it, and through a couple of coins into the Crisis fundraiser.
Actually, before I finish, let me talk about something tangentially related to this movie, but I think is interesting. It's one of those "write it down to get the damn thing out of your head" moments, a little Pepe Silvia conspiracy theory of mine. So one of the other main minds behind Last House was Sean Cunningham, who later went on to direct the first Friday the 13th, and produced some of the sequels. In fact, Steve Miner, later director of Parts 2 and 3 of that series, was a production assistant on this. Now as well as being a massive rip-off of Halloween and Psycho, the first few Friday the 13th movies seem to borrow a lot from Mario Bava's classic 1971 giallo A Bay of Blood (aka Twitch of the Death Nerve, and a whole bunch more alternative titles). In fact, there are a few death scenes in the first two Fridays that a suspiciously similar to the ones in Bay... and in Friday 2 there's one that's straight-up identical to a set piece in Bay! Now to this day, Cunningham and Miner deny ever having seen Bay of Blood... which I find doubtful, as the same distributor for Last House picked up Bay for US release, selling it as, wait for it, The Last House on the Left Part 2! You big old fibbers Sean and Steve! Given how the lawsuit against Cunningham by original Friday the 13th screenwriter Victor Miller is going, and the touches of dishonesty there, it makes more certain that I'm right about this one...
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