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