The Last House on the Left

If there's a lesson to be learned from The Last House on the Left, it's this - If you ever see a suspicious-looking and awkward teen lurking in the dark corner of a supermarket, and he offers to take you to his seedy motel room for some weed, don't go with him. Thanks, Hollywood. I'll be sure to remember that next time I'm in such a situation. If there's a lesson to be learned from this review, it's that your money and time is much better spent doing something else than watching this remake of a 1972 Wes Craven film (which itself was a remake of a movie from 1960 called The Virgin Spring).

It's too bad that teenage friends Mari (Sara Paxton) and Paige (Martha MacIssac) learn the lesson the movie wants to impart with us a little too late. They follow the teen named Justin (Spencer Treat Clark) back to his room, hoping for a party, only to learn that his family are a group of psychotic killers on the run from the law. We witness in the film's opening scene how Justin's father, Krug (Garret Dillahunt), Uncle Francis (Aaron Paul), and Krug's girlfriend Sadie (Riki Lindhome) murdered a couple of police detectives. (Just to let us know they're *really* evil, the movie makes us watch Krug strangle one of the detectives with a car seatbelt and forces him to bleed all over a family photo of the detective's children.) The murder has made front page news, and the family doesn't want any witnesses, so Krug and the others take the two girls out to the woods to have their way with them. Paige ends up dead, and Mari ends up getting raped and left for dead when she tries to escape and is hit by a stray bullet. With a storm bearing down on the local area, the killers decide to take refuge in the closest house nearby, which just happens to belong to Mari's parents, John (Tony Goldwyn) and Emma (Monica Potter).

John, Emma, and Mari have come to the house for a much-needed family vacation after dealing with the tragedy the past year of their eldest son, Ben, dying. When the killers arrive at the house, wounded and disheveled (Mari and Paige got a few hits in on them before they were overpowered), the parents initially have no idea, as they think their daughter is staying overnight with the friend. Then young Justin begins to feel racked with guilt when he realizes who the house belongs to, and begins to leave little signs for the parents to discover who they are and what they did. When Mari manages to drag herself to the front porch of the house and the parents discover her clinging to what little life she has left, they decide to take the law into their own hands by seeking bloody vengeance. This is obviously intended to be a thorny moral issue. Heck, the film's poster even asks us "If bad people hurt someone you loved, how far would you go to hurt them back"? Too bad it never has any intention of answering this question, as The Last House on the Left is an entirely exploitive and cheap enterprise designed solely as a gore show.

Yes, there is quite a lot of gore. The R-rating is put into effect as we get to see close up and graphic depictions of stabbings, rapes, attempted drownings, fingers being cut off in a kitchen garbage disposal, blood-splattered shootings, and to top it off, someone being paralyzed then stuck in a microwave until their head explodes. The problem is the movie stops at the shock value of these images. There's nothing behind them other than the filmmakers wanted to maybe raise a concerned eyebrow or two. The only way a story like The Last House on the Left could work is if we actually cared about or were interested in what was going on, or about the people these things are happening to. But we don't, because everyone who exists in this movie exists for a single narrow-minded purpose. The daughter exists solely to be raped, the daughter's friend to be murdered, the villains to do terrible things and then have terrible things happen to them...There are no real relationships on display, not even within the family. Mere moments after they arrive at the vacation home, the daughter runs off to be with her friend. It's like she knows what the audience is here for, and wants to give it to them as quickly as possible.

Not only does this cheapen the entire film, but it actually managed to lessen the impact of the film's harsher sequences with me. The characters are so single-minded in their motivation, I had a hard time seeing them as people instead of merely as manipulations of the screenplay. The movie asks us how far would we go to find vengeance, but the characters of John and Emma never do. As soon as they find their daughter and discover what's happened to her, they grab the nearest sharp or blunt object, and start going after the killers. There's no pause for questioning, asking if what they're doing is right, or even a moment's hesitation. Like everyone else, they know what they're here for. (The fact that the characters literally have nothing to do with anything in the movie until the final 40 minutes or so is proof of this.) This could have been a tense and terrifying dramatic thriller, but because the movie never strays from the expected path or gives us anything to think about, we're simply left to wait for the inevitable.

The film's sole saving grace is that the director Dennis Iliadis shows some talent here. I hope he can get attached to a real movie next time around. The Last House on the Left is for people who don't care what's going on up on the screen, as long as they get to see some severed limbs. When the film's poster asks smarter and tougher questions than anything brought up in the movie itself, you've got a problem.

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