Review #10 THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972, Wes Craven)

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When a middle-class couple realise that the drifters they have let into their home are responsible for the rape and murder of their daughter, cheerful hospitality curdles into bloody revenge.

Starring  Sandra Peabody, Lucy Grantham, David Hess, Martin Kove

Written by  Wes Craven

Produced by  Sean S Cunningham

Duration  84 minutes

Imagine for a moment that your name is Bonnie Broecker. It’s the mid ’60s and you’re married to Wesley Earl Craven, a respected humanities professor at Clarkson College of Technology, New York.

Life is ticking along nicely; your husband has begun messing around making short films with a 16mm camera, but it’s just a hobby – he had a strict Catholic upbringing where movies were forbidden, so it’s probably just something he needs to get out of his system.

Then the man you call Wes starts to get more serious about this filmmaking business. He suddenly jacks in the academia and starts editing and making writing contributions to X-rated flicks – under a pseudonym, mercifully.

Things don’t quite work out between the two of you and sadly you’re divorced by the decade’s end. Then, one night in 1972, you’re walking past a movie theatre showing something called THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, directed by one Wes Craven. Curious to see what your ex’s cinematic ambitions have led to, you purchase a ticket.

Eighty-four minutes later the credits are rolling up and the rest of the audience has shuffled away, but you're still rooted to your seat with your mouth agape.

"Oh, Wes," you whisper. "What the fuck was that?"

There must also have been several of Craven’s ex-students who went to see LAST HOUSE, not to mention his sophomore effort, THE HILLS HAVE EYES, and all the other horror hits and less-than-hits that followed. Did any of these youngsters equate these intense films with the bland teacher who used to hold court in the lecture hall droning on about philosophy and art history? Did any of them – let alone his ex-missus – think, "Oh yeah, this doesn’t surprise me, I always knew he had it in him"?

Just like David Lynch being a gawky former Eagle Scout and John Woo being a softly spoken pacifist, egghead Craven creating the kind of films he did is pretty baffling. But even if his move into exploitation is as unfathomable as the evil that lurks in society's underbelly, he certainly made an impact on horror cinema.

Craven actually changed the genre three times in three separate decades. The raw and uncompromising LAST HOUSE raised the bar for what true terror could be on screen; ten years later he breathed new life into tired slasher flicks by unleashing Freddy Kruger in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, and then in the ’90s he delivered the meta mega-hit SCREAM.

Viewed today, LAST HOUSE remains a truly gut-wrenching ordeal. The abuse meted out by the odious Krug and his gleeful band on the poor girls, whose only crime was venturing from their leafy suburb into the big city, is difficult to watch, with the "piss your pants" humiliation being especially not for the faint-hearted.

Yes, the film is inarguably amateurish and occasionally cheesy, with its bumbling cops (including a pre-KARATE KID Martin Kove), prolonged cake-decorating sequence and cheerful music. But the lurching tonal shifts make the scenes of stark violence and torture even more shocking, coming so abruptly and so relentlessly as to make the viewer feel that they themselves have been physically assaulted.

It's an important horror picture, of that there can be no doubt, but even if we had never ended up hearing of Professor Craven or Sean S Cunningham (producer here, later director of FRIDAY THE 13TH) again, LAST HOUSE would still stand on its own as a work of genuine power.

Five stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  You don’t actually see the street clearly, so it's impossible to verify whether there were in fact no more houses on that side. But why would such a trusted educator lie to us?

What would a movie called THE FIRST HOUSE ON THE LEFT be about?  You could say it had already been done by way of Craven’s inspiration for LAST HOUSE, Ingmar Bergman’s THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960), although since that film is set in 14th Century Sweden it was probably more of a wooden hut or something. Otherwise … well, maybe the couple who live in the first house turn out to be more of the forgive-and-forget type, resulting in a somewhat anticlimactic finale. 

Previously:  THE LAST LULLABY

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