Review #44 THE LAST HOUSE (2019, Samuel Farmer)

 

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An elderly (but tooled up) widow won’t give up her house to land developers because "it ain’t right". They, however, insist "she’s fer sure sellin". There is a clash. 

Starring  Camille Keaton, Scott Peeler, Karen Konzen, Eric Dooley, Christopher James Forrest  

Written by  Samuel Farmer

Produced by  Corina Seaburn, Jonathan Shepard

Duration  74 minutes    

   

In 2015, John Carpenter won a plagiarism case against fellow filmmaker Luc Besson concerning the movie LOCKOUT, which three years earlier the latter had produced. The film – starring a beefed-up Guy Pearce and featuring Maggie Grace getting kidnapped, just like she did in Besson's TAKEN – was a fun-enough sci-fi action romp, mid-budget and delivering middling thrills. Easy to pick up, watch while scrolling your phone, and then forget.

Except Carpenter was paying attention; he or one of his people, anyway. The movie was accused, and ultimately found guilty, of hewing far too close to the director’s own sci-fi action romp, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981). The rescue mission; the penetration of an impenetrable prison; the anti-authoritarian antihero. Consequently, its writing credits expanded to include JC and his ESCAPE co-writer Nick Castle, and those creative originators received enough compensation for Carpenter to be able to afford a lifetime season ticket to his beloved Milwaukee Bucks, and then come home and blissfully play his favourite PC game Dead Space long into the night without worrying about the electricity bill.

Now, when I watched LOCKOUT, not long after it came out, I didn't think about ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK at all – and I think about John Carpenter movies a lot. I as much equated the two films as I do Ed Sheeran’s 'Thinking Out Loud' to Marvin Gaye’s 'Let’s Get It On'. (An example of an unsuccessful plagiarism case.)

On the other hand, in the summer of 2008 I had sat in the cinema watching Neil Marshall’s DOOMSDAY with my mouth agape at how flagrantly it was ripping off ESCAPE. The hero of that movie even has a Snake Plissken eye-patch! And yet DOOMSDAY has remained free of litigation.

And while we're on the subject, what about all those cheapo Italian rip-offs that came out during the ’80s? Why did Carpenter, MAD MAX director George Miller and THE WARRIORS’ Walter Hill never team up and file a class action suit against (among others) 2019: AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK, ESCAPE FROM THE BRONX and THE EXTERMINATORS OF THE YEAR 3000, forcing directors Sergio Mantino, Enzo Castellari and Guiliano Carnimeo to cough up billions of their ill-gotten lire?

So, coming to a grisly revenge movie called THE LAST HOUSE, I was fully expecting it to be a THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT rip-off. But it turns out I was wrong – albeit not entirely.

Because despite the title, this film wants to remind you of another grimy, ’70s exploitation flick. What it actually has its sights on is I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1978) – and the poster makes this plenty explicit. THE LAST HOUSE stars that film’s Camile Keaton in another avenging angel role, and wants to do for her what David Gordon Green attempted so earnestly with Jamie Lee Curtis in his ill-judged HALLOWEEN legacy trilogy. This despite there already being an I SPIT ON remake (with sequels!), not to mention that Keaton herself appeared in the direct sequel to the original, subtitled DEJA VU.

But in reality, THE LAST HOUSE skews closer to the truly limp attempt to honour the ‘final girl’ from the original TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE in the 2022 edition of that franchise.

(Sidenote: CHAINSAW 2022 is actually quite fun! Its main target is Gen Z and their attempts to gentrify Leatherface's hometown. Anyone holding a mobile phone aloft to film the chainsaw-flailing maniac's rampage gets their arm severed before getting the chance to post their video on TikTok! I recommend it.)

So, yeah. A class act THE LAST HOUSE most definitely is not. The company names that lead the opening credits do not bode well: "Chance in Hell Productions"; "Bad Man Pictures". Neither does its alternate title: CRY FOR THE BAD MAN.

It’s a home invasion flick. It’s also a ‘sell us your land or we’ll force you off’ story. But what it really feels like is a short film that’s been expanded into a feature – except in length only, with nothing added to its breadth or depth. It feels interminably long for a 74-minute feature, like all they did was take scenes that used to last 20 seconds and pad them out to 15 minutes.

The dialogue feels improvised, but not in an inspired way, more like no one bothered to memorise the script (or was never given one in the first place?), so instead just mumbled out semi-relevant phrases half-remembered from old TV shows and better movies.

The colour is ugly and oversaturated, like the whole movie is the final scene of TAXI DRIVER – except about a hundredth as good as that sounds, since this director handles action like he’s trying to flick a light switch with a broom. 

In a word: avoid.

So are there any genuinely new ideas left in the world? Or are we all just scrapping around the same drying-out pool of inspiration? One thing is for damn sure: there will always be a difference between good execution and total piss-poor fumble-job.

One star out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  It’s one of those middle-of-nowhere gaffs with no neighbours, so it’s the last house on the left and on the right.

What would a movie called THE FIRST HOUSE be about?  Let’s go for a documentary about the origins of house music in the club scene of early-’80s Chicago.

Previously:  LAST NIGHT IN SOHO

Next time:  FERNGULLY: THE LAST RAINFOREST

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

Review #43 LAST NIGHT IN SOHO (2021, Edgar Wright)

 

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London, 2021. A fashion student with kind-of clairvoyant powers moves to the city and forms a cross-time connection thing with a young woman from the 1960s.

Starring  Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith, Michael Ajao, Terence Stamp, Diana Rigg

Written by  Edgar Wright, Krysty Wilson-Cairns

Produced by  Nira Park, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Edgar Wright

Duration  116 minutes

I really wish I enjoyed Edgar Wright’s stuff more. I mean, I should do: I’m in the ideal demographic and generation; his interests overlap with my own; his movies are well-structured, competently made and high in entertainment value. And I was 16 when his breakthrough TV series Spaced was first aired and absolutely loved it.

But somehow, the word that comes to mind when I think of SHAUN OF THE DEAD, HOT FUZZ, SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD and BABY DRIVER is ‘overrated’. None of them are as good as people babble on about, with SHAUN in particular elevated onto a pedestal that puts it above criticism and seemingly giving Wright a pass for life. That film is good, don't get me wrong, but come on: as far as horror-comedies go, it falls short of AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, BRAINDEAD, EVIL DEAD II, GREMLINS, CRITTERS, TREMORS, GHOSTBUSTERS, RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, BEETLEJUICE, RE-ANIMATOR or THE LOST BOYS.

I do like THE WORLD’S END. That’s the only one that feels like it was made by an adult for adults, where Wright transcends his juvenile dedication to style over substance. He’s similar to Robert Rodriguez in that way, but I’d say I’ve got more out of the cinema of Rodriguez over the years – although to be fair to Edgar, Robert’s own idea of ‘grown up’ is SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR.

LAST NIGHT IN SOHO? I’m afraid it's another entry in Wright’s oeuvre of ‘meh’.

We're introduced to Thomasin McKenzie’s Eloise dancing around her bedroom in some kind of homemade dress to Peter & Gordon's ‘World Without Love’, indulging her twin fantasies of becoming a clothing designer and living in the 1960s. She has a goal, she has a passion – but she’s also socially awkward and clumsy in the best Bridget Jones/every-romcom-ever tradition, colliding with her record player (of course she uses vinyl). She also sees her dead mother in the vanity mirror, sowing a supernatural seed into the plot. I’d call this opening sequence an effectively economical bit of scene-setting, if the whole thing didn’t feel so vaguely irritating.

"It's not what you imagine, London. You've got to look out for yourself!" warns her gran when Eloise receives a letter admitting her into the city’s premier fashion college, giving me echoes of those poor girls in THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT who also made the fatal mistake of visiting a major metropolis.

Thankfully, Wright doesn’t have anything nearly as nasty/daring in mind for young Eloise. The next morning, she’s staring wide-eyed out the window of a cross-country train away from whatever backwards but safe hamlet she's from, oversized headphones blasting the reassuring sounds of ‘Don’t Throw Your Love Away’ by The Searchers.

She’s barely out of King's Cross St Pancras before she's forced to endure rapey innuendo from a pervy black cab driver on the way to her dorm. Therein lies further danger in the shape of her roommates/antagonists-in-waiting, who overuse the word ‘babes’, drill her with some exposition-inducing questions and take her to the pub for her first experience of alcohol (which of course they don't have in the countryside) and of hiding in a toilet stall overhearing people she had thought were her friends slagging her off.

Fortunately, Diana Rigg enters the picture as a kindly landlady who offers an escape from the Bitch Patrol by way of an attic room for rent. Eloise moves in quick-smart and, despite the constant flashes of red and blue from a sign outside making it look like she’s in SUSPIRIA (nice try, Edgar), she falls asleep peacefully to ‘You're My World’ by Cilla Black.

(At this point, I started to wonder if Wright had one eye on flogging vinyl-pressed soundtracks to hipsters and misty-eyed Boomers when he came up with this project – and yes, Barry Ryan’s ‘Eloise’ does get an airing.)

During her slumber, our Eloise finds herself embodying Anya Taylor-Joy’s independent-minded singer Sandie in the Big Smoke of the Harold Wilson years. As these flashback-dreams roll on nightly, her EYES OF LAURA MARS psychic-connection to such an empowered female gifts Eloise a renewed confidence during her waking life, demonstrated by how she struts down Carnaby Street with a new hairdo towards college where she wows her teacher with her clothing sketches. But when Sandie realises that all the men she trusted are bastards and have put her on a collision course with coercion, exploitation and murder, the ghosts of the past start to impact Eloise's present and she must truly shake off her passivity once and for all.

LAST NIGHT IN SOHO isn’t exactly terrible, but it is a promising concept still in search of a solid film. I keep reading that it's a 'psychological horror' – Edgar's doing his Argento impression, but where's the psychology at? Everything is cartoony and one-dimensional; perhaps the pandemic rushed it into production before the script had gone through sufficient redrafts. McKenzie does her best with her deer-in-the-neon-headlights role, but between this and M Night Shyamalan’s OLD she might want to tell her agent to only give her screenplays that are populated by recognisable human beings.

And the weird anti-London sentiment that Wright (born in Poole, Somerset) peppers throughout really grates, with pearls like "London can be a lot" and "London’s a bad place" – maybe don't spend all your time in fucking Soho, then. (I did however chuckle at Michael Ajao’s bashful, non-threatening love interest admitting that he found hopping over the Thames to the north of the city a really daunting step.)

One definitely pandemic-influenced touch and probably the highlight for me: the John Carpenter-style Panavision shots of empty central London streets during the end credits.

Hmm, now where's that old DVD of HALLOWEEN hiding ...

Two stars out of five.

 

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  As things wrap up, Eloise is well on her way to fashion-designing success, so it seems unlikely that further evenings in the West End aren’t upcoming.

What would a movie called FIRST NIGHT IN SOHO be about?  Probably dodging so many tourists that eventually you get pissed off and jump on a train to do a reverse-Ajao and have a much better time somewhere south of the river.

Previously:  SAFETY LAST!

Next time:  THE LAST HOUSE

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com