My position on Horror remakes has been fairly well
established at this point. As a general rule the most I hope for is for
indifference, at worst I break out into hives.
But The Last House On The Left was singled out by Stephen
King as one of the best horror films of the last decade and though King’s
opinions do occasionally lead me to believe he is from Rand McNally (where
people wear shoes on their head and hamburgers eat people) he has steered me
towards more good films than bad. Here’s what he wrote about Last House On The
Left,
“(The film) fills us with rage and sorrow, and if there’s an emotion more foreign to a Friday The 13th movie than sorrow, I don’t know what is. Our identification is all with the victim. The villains are bad people, they deserve what’s coming to them. What they do not deserve is a sequel they come back as our buddies.
Roger that in a big fucking way. There is another element at
play here, being that the original Last House On The Left is a film that I care
for not at all. I’ll let King take this one again…
The original Last House On The Left is so bad it rises to the level of absurdity- call it Abbot And Costello Meet The Rapists.
Too. Fucking. Right.
Unlike most of the other remakes it’s not exactly like this
one could be worse.
In the final analysis, if The Last House On The Left is not
as good of a film as King says it is, it at least tries to be as good of a
movie as King said it is. The key phrase here is Victim identification. I
haven’t seen a movie so unabashedly take the side of the victim in a long time.
Even in the original Last House On The Left there was the
nasty subtext that by leaving the safety of home and going to the big bad city
in search of drugs and rock n’ roll, that the girls got what they paid for,
however inadvertently. Here they didn’t sign up for this, by any stretch of the
imagination. The girls don’t go “looking for trouble” even the girl who drags
along her friend in search of weed is just being irresponsible rather than self
destructive. Hell if you look at it closely, trouble wasn’t even really looking
for them. They weren’t being set up, it was just bad timing. A ghastly
consequences of a terrible series of coincidences.
There is another crucial shift in the film’s narrative that
has been more controversial. In this version of the story the girl survives the
attack. Changing the situation from the parents merely getting gruesome revenge
to the parents attempting to protect their wounded daughter (the fact that they
have already lost a son in unrelated circumstances also a smart choice, making
their resolve all the stronger and making the lengths they are willing to go to
more understandable). As a narrative decision it’s gangbusters, adding a whole
other of tension to the story.
Many have argued that by having the girl be alive the film
has wussed out by giving the parents a much clearer moral imperative than they
did in the original film. But let’s call a spade a spade here, if you’re
watching a film primarily because you’re interested in the moral quandaries it
poses, then you’re not watching The Last House On The Left 1972, unless it’s by
some grievous error. You’re watching The Virgin Spring.
Director Iliadas directs with more flair and tension than
Wes Craven has displayed in his entire career, comparing it to the porn
production values of the first doesn’t even seem fair. The Cathedral woods are
menacing, and the way he slowly but thoroughly desecrates the house is
chillingly effective. If there’s a complaint to be had it’s the fact that you
can see the Rob Zombie influence stamped clearly across the film (why wear
grotesque art directed masks, if you’re going to A) Take them off after a few
moments B) Kill all witnesses.) Particularly in the bizarre final fifteen
seconds of the film which literally look as though they were tacked on from
another film.
On the whole though, The Last House On The Left is a film of
ambition and intense suspense. It might not be a great horror movie, but damned
if it only misses that distinction by inches.
2 comments:
Have you seen Haneke's Funny Games? I've been meaning to watch that and this back-to-back, since they share a similar premise, and see which I like better. (I suspect it'll be Funny Games.)
It might not of been a horror movie. It may have been a thriller. That doesn't mean it wasn't scary. Really good movie.
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