Mari and her friend Phyllis travel to a sketchy part of town for a concert on the eve of Mari's seventeenth birthday. They set out to find some weed on the way to the show. But to their great misfortune, they find themselves lured by the promise of Colombian grass into the hideout of escaped convicts Krug Stillo, and Fred "Weasel" Podowski, as well as their partner in crime Sadie and Krug's addict son, Junior.
The band of ingrates kidnap the girls and rape Phyllis. The next morning, they pile the young women in the trunk of their car with the intention of fleeing to Canada to escape the American authorities. But their car breaks down on the side of the road and they decide that it is time to dispose of their unwilling guests. Mari and Phyllis are raped, tortured, and murdered while incompetent police fail miserably to successfully track down the missing women.
Then the miscreants walk to a nearby house where they talk their way into a hot meal and a place to stay the night. What they don't initially realize is that they have taken refuge in the home of Mari's family, and her parents soon begin to piece together what has happened and prepare to give the killers their just deserts.
Last House on the Left was horror master Wes Craven's debut film as director. While not a particularly frightening film, it is undoubtedly gut wrenching, enraging, and difficult to view. For many people, the tag line may therefore hold true.
In particular, the scenes which span Mari and Phyllis' capture to their eventual demise take up much of the first half of the film and are particularly horrid and disturbing. They are clearly designed to horrify the audience and build feelings of hatred towards the films antagonists in order to prepare them for the bloodbath that is to come. They are highly effective in this regard.
The sickening scenes of violence, rape, and humiliation are interspersed needlessly with bad 70's rock and the slapstick hillbilly comedy of the bumbling police and a kooky chicken farmer. These distractions fail to weaken the films brutality or add effective comic relief, and could have been left out altogether.
Ultimately the bad guys get what they have coming to them, but it doesn't feel all that satisfying after what has happened, especially given that the girls are dead and vengeance won't change that fact for their parents, whose fate is left up in the air as well at the films closure.
The Last House on the Left has been frequently cited as one of the most controversial films of all time. It has been called depraved, obscene, and misogynistic amongst other things. There is no doubt that the acts depicted in the film are all of these things, but whether or not this also means that the film itself is must be another question.
It is true that the young women in The Last House on the Left are depicted in a manner that is far from liberating. They talk to each other about little more than boys and their breasts, and are only interested in partying. At the same time, it feels implied that their behaviour, namely going to a bad part of town, not wearing bras, drinking, and attempting to buy weed, led them to trouble. There is no explicit implication that this means what befalls them is their own fault, but it does highlight a common reactionary theme in horror films which seems to be that premarital sex and partying will put you on the wrong side of a bad guys machete.
So on the one hand, the villains are depicted as foul, despicable beings and their actions are depicted as cruel, grotesque, and wrong. At the same time, the young women are depicted as weak, shallow, victims. Even Mari's mother, during the revenge scenes, is only able to defeat her adversaries either using seduction, or by fighting Sadie, the female villain. Is the film purposefully misogynistic? Maybe not, but it is undoubtedly sexist in its depiction of women.
This film has often been compared to I Spit on Your Grave, which was released just a few years later. Both films are based on the rape/revenge premise. While Last House is even more gruesome and troubling in its violence, I Spit on Your Grave is perhaps more effective and positive.
For one thing, the protagonist in I Spit on Your Grave survives and obtains revenge against her attackers on her own. She is much less the helpless victim, and by the end of the film the viewer can feel a little less hollow than at the end of Last House. Regardless, this is a film that is not for the weak of heart, and is for those who want not necessarily to be scared, but certainly to be horrified.
2 chainsaws out of 5
Unrated: contains sexual content, nudity, violence, disturbing scenes, language, drug and alcohol content.
No comments:
Post a Comment