Okay, when I say I'm gonna do something, I do it, damn it! (or I make up more and more feeble excuses over time until the excuse mutates into something fantastic about you... like your new deodorant! Is that designer? Really? You smell like I imagine sex with Ashley Greene would be like... I'm classy) So, for you, dear readers, I've exposed myself to the recently-remade-and-now-out-on-DVD 'The Last House On The Left'... then the neighbour started yelling things at me like, "Why are you exposing yourself to the TV with the windows open? Put some pants on or I'm calling the cops!" Something like that. I wasn't really paying much attention, but what a whiner! Boo hoo, buddy. Boo hoo.After the cops tased me and duct taped my pants to my hips, I cooked up some perogies and checked out the latest addition to Thirty4Point5 Presents: Totally Wasted Movie Reviews - The Last House On The Left
Maybe you remember, or maybe you're high and your short term memory is shit right now... either way, as you may or may not recall (DUCK!!! that was for the high readers... totally love messing with the DUCK!!! damn... you really are high...) the original, Wes Craven directed version really messed with my head when I saw it as a child. It was really brutal and dealt with subject matter I wasn't old enough to comprehend. In the end, it really put a dent in my cinematic psyche. But, when I found out about the remade version, I was actually a little excited. I figured it would be modernized, which would strip away the look of the original that was so low budget it had a real documentary feel to it. In that film, the low budget look lent to the awfulness of the subject matter in ways that a highly polished, big budget film simply couldn't duplicate. Also, for the most part, all the recent horror remakes have been toned down for the summer crowd consumption... so clearly they weren't going to emulate the harshness of the original.... right? Well, one out of two ain't bad...
Outside of the typical, grievous bodily harm, the thing that made the original film so horrible was the intensity of the sexual violence (I'm actually making a face of disgust at the screen as I type that). It's what really sets the stage for the depth of brutality in the second half of this film that, at it's core, is basically a revenge film. The plot is simple: Bad people rape and attempt to murder a young girl then end up unknowingly taking shelter with the girls parents. The daughter manages to return home and the parents extract an insanely brutal, vengeance-based assault... free of audience judgement because we've been exposed to their motivation in great depth.
What I was hoping beyond hope was that this film would succeed for me this time... and I'll tell you why (did you ever doubt): I gave too much credit to the human race. I really believed that in this day and age, a modern audience does not need to see a 10 minute rape scene on a 70' wide screen for any reason at any time to set the stage for any form of motivation. I really thought we were knowledgeable and compassionate enough at this stage of our evolution that just hinting at what had occurred would be enough to incite a theatre to riotous rage... but apparently I was wrong. And you know... With just the hint, I would watch the parents cut every person in a 10 mile radius into squishy bits with a butter knife and a blowtorch for 18 hours of real-time mayhem. But having to be exposed to it at length (and yes, I keep using that word for a reason... because I don't feel like I've watched a movie as much as I've been exposed to it)... while the girl watches her friend dying of stab wounds just out of arms reach, ejected me so completely out of the story that I could only focus on the rest as a technical exercise.
So... I don't know. Lots of people have told me they liked the movie... but I think it's more just the thrill of revenge that they like. I pretty much wouldn't recommend this movie to anyone.
The End.
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