THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (2009, Dennis Iliadis)

 

* * * 

Just like the 1972 original: when a different middle-class couple realise that the drifters they have let into their home are responsible for the rape and murder of their daughter, friendly hospitality once again turns into bloody revenge.

Starring  Sara Paxton, Martha MacIsaac, Garret Dillahunt, Aaron Paul, Tony Goldwyn, Monica Potter

Written by  Adam Alleca, Carl Ellsworth

Produced by  Wes Craven, Sean S Cunningham, Marianne Maddalena

Duration  110 minutes

How exciting – my first review of a remake of a film I've already reviewed!

I can’t remember whether back in 2009 the word ‘remake’ was still in vogue. In more recent years, recycling/resurrecting existing intellectual property has tended to be called either a ‘reboot’, which takes stories we know and reinterprets them (the PLANET OF THE APES movies come to mind, or the various iterations of BATMAN), or a ‘legacy sequel’ (good ones: SCREAM 2022, TOP GUN: MAVERICK, BLADE RUNNER 2049, BAD BOYS FOR LIFE; bad ones: COMING 2 AMERICA, THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS, TRON: LEGACY, HALLOWEEN).

LAST HOUSE ’09 is definitely a straight-up remake. It’s not trying to update for the 21st Century the tale of ostensibly respectable parents avenging their murdered children by brutally dispatching the culprits. It’s certainly not a continuation of the same timeline or a long-in-gestation direct sequel.

Horror has to have the most remakes of all the major genres. There’s been a lot of ’em! And it would be wrong to dismiss them as uniformly bad just out of principle even if, for sure, it tends to be pot luck which way things go.

Bringing back the creator(s) to produce can seems like a good sign: the LAST HOUSE and HILLS HAVE EYES remakes are both pretty decent and have Wes Craven on board as a producer, whereas he went nowhere near the unpleasant A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET from 2010. I find it hard to see this as a coincidence. On the other hand, fellow genre-legend John Carpenter is credited on 2005’s disastrous THE FOG, and has admitted more generally that he doesn’t care about how good the new versions of his films are, so long as he gets paid.

So anyway, yeah: ‘pretty decent’. That basically sums up this THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. It’s hard to imagine anyone preferring it, unless they found the early-’70s fashions and slang from last time too distracting. But LAST HOUSE ’09 does omit certain elements from the original whose absence no one could possibly miss – I’m talking about the bumbling comedy cops who hitch a ride atop a truck loaded with chickens, or the jolly closing tune with lyrics that cheerfully recount the grim events we've just sat through.

This version nails its forbearer's gruelling sense of impending dread to a tee, albeit in a slicker, bigger-budgeted, noughties kind of way. Garret Dillahunt managed to go straight from loveably dopey deputy in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN to one of the most effective amoral sickos in recent memory, his portrayal of the monstrous Krug certainly equalling David Hess’s.

It's longer than the first go-around, so pads the runtime out with some unnecessarily detailed character introductions for heroes and villains alike. It shows the world what Jesse Pinkman (actor Aaron Paul) would be like if he himself broke bad beyond redemption. The score sounds like John Murphy put his ‘In the House, in a Heartbeat’ from 28 DAYS LATER in as a temp track and then forgot to replace it.

And, all in all, I liked it. In the face of lazy, knee-jerk opinions about the limited value of remakes, I always lean on the fact that THE FLY and THE THING turned out to be two of the best films of the ’80s. LAST HOUSE ’09 is nowhere near that level, but it does what it sets out to do with competency and professionalism and just about earns its right to exist. It may have sprouted deep in the looming shadow of the original, but it still managed to grow in that shade into a perfectly edible … mushroom, I guess that would be. So, there you go.

Three stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  It’s an isolated vacation home by a lake this time, so the proximity to previous or subsequent houses is even harder to determine than in the ’72 vintage. But why would, um, Greek director Dennis Iliadis, known for, er, a film titled HARDCORE (one that doesn’t have George C Scott in it) lie to us?

What would a movie called THE FIRST HOUSE ON THE LEFT be about?  Right, so I have to do this again, too. OK, well, this time, let’s say the people living in that earlier house turn out to be even more unhinged than Krug and company and slaughter the whole gang seconds after welcoming them in, forgoing the act-three suspense and just cutting straight to the grisly retribution.

Previously:  THE LAST DESCENT

Next time:  THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS  

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972, Wes Craven)

 * * * * * 

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 writing 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 on the left. 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

Next time:  THE LAST MERCENARY

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com