31 Days of Horror – October 6th – “The Last House on the Left”

“The Last House on the Left” opens with a long campy sequence that is reminiscent of “Happy Days” or even “Leave It to Beaver” in its quaint cheeriness.  Mom and Dad sit in the den and joke with their coming of age daughter about her upcoming birthday.  Life is simple.  Everyone is all smiles.  And then the lead character and her best friend get raped.  Yep.  That’s basically the summary of the first act.

Welcome Wes Craven to the big screen.

The forementioned daughter, Mari (Sandra Peabody), and her best friend Phyllis (Lucy Grantham) make a grave mistake on their way to a concert when they ask a stranger, Junior (Marc Sheffler), if he knows where to find some grass. He takes them to an apartment where they are immediately held against their will by two escaped convicts, Fred (Fred J. Lincoln) and Krug (David Hess) (those names sound familiar?), and their crew.  Phyllis is raped almost immediately.  The next morning the convicts load the girls into the trunk and take them on the road.  When the car breaks down they haul them into the woods for more torture and rape.  Their murders look inevitable.

Pretty bleak, eh?  Despite many production shortcomings, there are a lot of things that work really well here.  First of all, the torturers seem sadistic in a believable way, maybe partially because they are also pretty dumb, basically insensitive, rather than the super vindictive genius masterminds that we see in torture porn movies lately.  Krug and Fred work as villains because they are horrible but still somewhat subtle, and a scene of reflective remorse shows that they are ultimately still human.  On top of that, Craven’s directing goes over the top in a few scattered comedy scenes and grows subtle and careful during some of the most horrifying violent displays.  The first rape scene happens off screen, the camera slowly zooms in on Mari’s horrified face as she watches a man attack her friend.  One of the early torture scenes keeps cutting back to a music videoesque montage of the Mom and Dad in 70′s garb hamming it up as they bake a birthday cake for their daughter, which somehow heightens the creepiness of the whole thing.

There’s a major shift for the final act, though, and the story almost does a 180 degree turn.  At this point, it becomes morally gray in a new way.  Those subtle displays of violence earlier turn more graphic.  And the movie doesn’t really tell you what to think of it all.

Craven’s debut (as both a director and writer) somehow succeeds at being disturbing and being ironically funny, sometimes achieving both within just seconds of each other.  Despite a very tight budget with a young, inexperienced cast and presumably production team, Craven keeps it entertaining and shows flashes of great instincts for what will really effect the audience. The slang, bell bottoms and acoustic rock soundtrack (actually written and performed by the actor that played Krug) gives “The Last House on the Left” an interesting 1970′s atmosphere that actually adds more than it detracts as far as dating the film.

original poster for the movie