The Last House on the Left (1972)
The Last House on the Left is a bit of an oddity in the modern era. At the time the movie was given an X rating which director Wes Craven blatantly ignored by stealing the R-rating frame off another movie and splicing it onto his. It was a big hit at the drive-in circuit and famously banned in the UK as one of the Video Nasties. It enjoyed more of a resurgence in the video store era where horror fans scoured the shelves for ultra-violent delights and the movie’s reputation made it catnip to those people. Unfortunately it’s a pretty bad movie.
The Last House on the Left is a play on The Virgin Spring, a pretty simple morality tale about a young girl, beloved by her parents, who goes out and dips her nose into trouble, ultimately catching more than she bargained and getting swept up with a group of murderous criminals who rape and kill she and her best friend. But the real kicker is that her murderers wind up lost near her family home where they go for help and end up staying with her parents, who figure out what their house-guests have done and take bloody revenge.
The premise sounds great doesn’t it? Now what if I told you that the villains of the movie have a jaunty folk-tune theme song to accompany their very graphic torture, rape, and murder of two teenager girls? Now, also imagine a sub-plot about two hilariously inept sheriff’s deputies on the way to help the girl’s parents who keep having whacky misadventures, and one of them is Martin Kove and he sure is a big lummox.
There’s qualities of The Last House on the Left that are good, but this movie is so tonally all over the place and it’s really leaning on the brutality of the events on-screen and premise to carry it across the finish line. It’s not irredeemably bad but this is about as rough as a first film can be and not be pure trash.
The Last House on the Left (2009)
The Last House on the Left remake drew a lot of criticism at the time for showing pretty much the entire movie, including the main villain’s death in the trailer. I bear it no such ill-will because I watched that trailer about 50 times as I waited for the movie to come out. It featured one of the few good examples of somber-trailer-coversong I’ve ever heard.
The movie is pretty much the same story: a group of murderous criminals lead by the psychopathic Krug (Garrett Dillahunt), his sadistic girlfriend Sadie (Garfunkel and Oates’ Riki Lindhome), third wheel Francis (Aaron Paul right around when Breaking Bad was first airing) comes upon a teenage girl, Mari (Sara Paxton of The Innkeepers) and her towny friend Paige (Superbad’s Martha MacIsaac) trying to score weed from Krug’s abused strung-out son Justin (Spencer Treat Clark).
The girls are taken and brutalized in the woods, Paige is killed and Mari is raped and shot but manages to escape barely alive. And as before Krug and crew wind up at the home of Mari’s parents (Monica Potter and Tony Goldwyn) where they find out what happened and take revenge.
Is it a good remake?
Yes. The Last House on the Left remake builds on what came before and makes it a whole lot less of a mess. We don’t need the inept police sub-plot and the urgency of the plot works a lot better if Mari’s parents have a reason not to just leave the cabin and call the police, the revenge concept is good for ham-fisted social commentary but the parents having to kill their houseguests to protect themselves and their injured daughter just feels a lot less violent for the sake of violence. Which isn’t to say this movie doesn’t really take joy in inflicting pain on our three villains, the microwave scene that tags the end of the film as an out-of-order nearly post-credits bit gets a lot of flack but it sure is a satisfying send-off for the film’s most repugnant character. David Hess’ Krug was one of the few great things about the original film but Garrett Dillahunt brings the sort of performance we’d come to expect from him in years to come, his Krug is one of the great cinematic villains.
Does it stand on its own?
The Last House on the Left remake doesn’t deviate much from the original but it stands firmly on its own. The cast is strong and the characters are well-written, the filmmakers just kind of lucked into this cast of dependable TV actors and Garrett Dillahunt before his big career boom. This movie was so good that it gave me a false sense of security that the I Spit on Your Grave remake released the following year would be good.
Watch, Toss, or Buy?
Buy it!