director/screenwriter
Wes Craven
producer
Sean S. Cunningham
cinematographer
Victor Hurwitz
music
David Hess
editor
Wes Craven
cast
Sandra Cassel (Mari Collingwood)
Lucy Grantham (Phyllis Stone)
David Hess (Krug Stillo)
Fred Lincoln (Weasel)
Jeramie Rain (Sadie)
Marc Sheffler (Junior Stillo)
Gaylord St. James (Dr. Bill Collingwood)
Cynthia Carr (Estelle Collingwood)
Ada Washington (Ada)
Marshall Anker (Sheriff)
Martin Kove (Deputy)
mpaa rating: R or unrated
running
time: 84m
u.s.
release: 8/30/72
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
fan
website
(British)
fan
website
(American)
david
hess official site
(last house soundtrack available here)
last
house on the left
(unrelated official site of an all-girl Australian punk band
naming themselves after the film)
other wes
craven films
reviewed on this website:
- cursed
- the hills have eyes
- red
eye
- scream
- scream
2
- scream
3
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Prior to revisiting Wes Craven's
scandalous debut Last House on the Left on its well-scrubbed
new DVD -- released the last week of August 2002, roughly thirty
years to the day it had its big-time theatrical launch in Boston
-- I hadn't seen it in about twelve years. Yet during that time,
one moment stuck with me: not the hideous sexual violence of
the film's human monsters, not the equally horrifying come-uppance
scenes late in the game, but the moment when the four killers
on the lam -- vicious ringleader Krug (David Hess), his junkie
son Junior (Marc Sheffler), and their sicko accomplices Weasel
(Fred Lincoln) and Sadie (Jeramie Rain) -- stand around in a
break in the carnage, sticky with blood, their eyes hooded with
emotions we can only guess at. Shame? Self-disgust? Sadness?
Wes Craven has said many times that he intended Last House
to show violence as what it truly is -- repugnant and ugly --
and he certainly does, but the real proof is the post-violence
blues, if you will. The "fun" is over, and in a quiet
moment the monsters are left with awareness of themselves.
Hired to write a quickie horror
film for a Boston distributor, Craven delivered a steaming Petit
Guignol package both reactionary (in both senses; Craven was
reacting against the antiseptic screen violence of the day, and
whether he intended this or not, the film definitely shows the
perils of being a teenage girl out in the city looking to score
weed) and derivative (Craven cheerfully swiped the plot from
Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring; ever wonder whether
the melancholy Swede ever saw the grindhouse knockoff of his
classic?). The script went further and pounded harder than anyone
was really prepared for; but because it was the early '70s, everyone
involved (after some tremors of doubt) shrugged and jumped into
the deep end. The result is the real thing -- the rubbery voyeuristic
horror of snuff, wedded to a classical revenge arc. Craven and
company tapped into something hot, dark and deep; Craven has
since made fun, scary horror movies -- indeed, he's been the
most consistently successful horror director of his generation
-- but he never again captured the low-budget nightmarishness
of Last House, the sick rustle of gore-drenched leaves,
the grainy verisimilitude of the abattoir dragged out into the
daylight of nature.
The first reel or so is downright
cruel -- in some ways crueller than any of the brutality that
follows, especially on second viewing, because it offers joy
and innocence about to be splintered. We meet Mari Collingwood
(Sandra Cassel) on the verge of her seventeenth birthday. She
and her friend Phyllis (Lucy Grantham) -- they're close, but
have only known each other less than a year -- are going to the
city to see Bloodlust, a rock band that sounds suspiciously like
Alice Cooper (chicken death is mentioned). Almost as an afterthought,
they decide to score some pot, and their wanderings bring them
into the lair of Krug and company (one of the film's early titles).
Interestingly, it's the woman of the group -- Sadie, whose name
carries a whiff of the Beatles song and the Manson family --
whose bisexuality disguised as feminism prompts Krug to order
Junior to bring back a couple of girls. The next half hour takes
a hard left into psychological and physical torture, of which
the most painful to watch is the former: Krug, feeling his power,
orders Phyllis to piss her pants, and later encourages Mari and
Phyllis to disrobe and "make it together." (Significantly,
Craven does not take the opportunity to unveil the forced-lesbian
scene a lesser exploitation flick would call for; we see very
little of their tearful, awkward fumbling.)
Death comes, as it must, and
the film is off and running towards its second half -- when the
killers wind up at the house of Mari's parents, who are concerned
about her whereabouts but aren't yet aware of her situation.
It's comedy of the sickest kind to watch this motley crew --
particularly Krug -- trying to play the perfect polite houseguests.
The dinner scene, down to the choice of spaghetti, seems informed
by Malcolm McDowell's uneasy repast with Patrick Magee in the
previous year's Clockwork Orange (and Craven even has
Sadie croon "Singin' in the Rain" in her tub in an
early scene). At this point, weird things start happening in
your brain: You know what has to happen -- the bloody revenge
of the parents -- and yet, even though you've seen the horror
of the killers' actions, you don't want it to happen.
You want a flicker more of the remorse you saw before; you want
someone -- maybe Junior, the most guilt-wracked of the bunch
-- to come clean; you want the felons to be taken into custody;
mostly, you don't want the parents to get revenge because of
what it will do to them.
The howling and snorting about
Last House's moral vacuum ring nonsensical to me: here
is a film in which the two lengthy setpieces of beastly behavior
are followed by sickened quietude. I think that's what
gets to people; if the film were less artful, less serious about
its purpose, it could easily be brushed off as another 42nd-Street
revengesploitation flick. Still, in 1972 people were awfully
bothered about the increased violence of movies as a result of
the (then) more lenient R rating -- Clockwork Orange,
Straw Dogs, Dirty Harry, Polanski's scarifying
Macbeth: one film after another was reflecting the nation's
soul-sickness knee-deep in Vietnam. Last House, with no
stars and no name director, was the easiest target of the bunch.
Of the major workaday critics, Gene Siskel excoriated it, while
Roger Ebert awarded it three and a half stars (a case could be
made that Ebert's influential rave greatly helped not only Craven's
career but also that of Sean Cunningham, who went on to direct
Friday the 13th, an irony Ebert couldn't be expected to
enjoy). It became one of the banned "Video Nasties"
in Britain, where it stirs up trouble to this day (to learn why,
click here). Exhibitors would routinely recut
prints of the film to their liking.
Due to that last, there has
been much debate over the past three decades as to what constitutes
the "complete, uncut" version of Last House.
The film could become more or less graphic depending on which
theater you saw it in, or which videocassette release (Vestron,
MGM, CIC) you watched. Throw a stick on the web and you'll hit
ten online video retailers claiming to have the most complete
version. MGM's DVD includes an intro by Craven himself, who puts
the seal of complete-uncut approval on what you're about to watch;
there may still be gorehounds who insist that the DVD is missing
three seconds of the celebrated disembowelling scene, but the
truth is, except in fits and starts, Last House on the Left
is not nearly as gory as you'd think. True, it has its sanguinary
moments, but, like The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it gets its overall charge more
from the constant threat of sadism than from anything
we actually witness. (And in any event, the current DVD represents
Craven's final director's cut, and that should be enough. If
the thought of a Dutch bootleg out there that's 29 seconds longer
bothers you, my advice is to get more fresh air and a hobby or
two.)
The actors -- even Marshall
Anker and Martin Kove as goofy sheriff and deputy in the much-maligned
comic-relief subplot -- deliver what's needed; Ebert accurately
judged the performances "unmannered" and "natural."
We like Mari and Phyllis because the actresses are smart and
amiable (Mari has an easy rapport with her parents, whom Craven
depicts as a fairly hip couple with a healthy shared libido --
how rare is that for a film made in the "never trust
anyone over 30" era?). The spiky Jeramie Rain, the mopey
Marc Sheffler, and the passively sadistic Fred Lincoln are three
of the more distinctive lackeys of evil in movie history, headed
by David Hess in a performance of crowning loathsomeness as Krug.
This überpsycho is given a cartoonishly ominous build-up;
the radio informs us that he killed "two nuns and a priest,"
and we see him popping a child's balloon á la Robert Walker
in Strangers on a Train (the child, by the way, is Craven's
son Jonathan). Hess brings a scruffy, Abbie Hoffman-by-way-of-Charlie-Manson
brio to the role (Craven, by then a father of two, was possibly
exploiting parental fears of predatory male hippies), and if
Hess was bewildered (as he's said) that people confused him with
Krug, one might fairly ask Hess if he saw the movie. Perhaps
the most appalling aspect of Krug, as interpreted by Hess, is
the maniac's smug assurance that things will inevitably turn
his way. When Mari's father gets the drop on Krug with a chainsaw,
Hess, who was genuinely wary since it was a real chainsaw chewing
up real wood, used his fear to give Krug a dawning awareness
that he might not get out of this one.
And how many horror films can
you name whose lead villain not only composed the song score
but sang it? In another corner of his life, David Hess
was -- and continues to be -- a busy musician; among other things,
he cowrote the Elvis hit "All Shook Up." Hess contributes
several tunes here, such as the opening-title "Wait for
the Rain," a gentle Led Zeppelin-esque ballad with the refrain
"And the road leads to nowhere," and the rather too
exact "Baddies' Theme," with lyrics like "Krugsie,
you know that this foolin' around isn't getting us out of the
state." And his mournful composition "Now You're All
Alone" graces the post-mortem scene with Krug and his cohorts
surveying the human wreckage. Those expecting the soundtrack
of such a notorious film to be more ... I don't know ... kick-ass
will be disappointed; but the mix of the tender folk singing
and the bestial Krug -- both, of course, emerging from David
Hess -- makes the movie, I think. And in that juxtaposition the
movie's true source of horror and posterity can be found. Like
the best and most indelible horror films, Last House on the
Left is completely sui generis, often imitated but
never duplicated, and I submit that it says more about the collision
of the Love Generation with the sulfur of Altamont and Vietnam
than any ten officially "serious" movies of the period.
Craven didn't need to conjure up Freddys or Ghostfaces back then;
all he had to do was glance at a newspaper.
Much of the background information
in this piece was gleaned from the excellent book Wes Craven's
Last House on the Left: The Making of a Cult Classic by David
A. Szulkin (who also made the making-of featurette on the DVD,
and assembled the most complete print of the film possible).
Highly recommended, and available from the publisher's website.
Also worth buying for those interested in the British "Video
Nasties" furor (in which Last House was consistently
front and center): David Kerekes and David Slater's thick, absorbing,
generously illustrated See No Evil: Banned Films and Video
Controversy.
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