I’ve never seen Wes Craven’s directorial debut, the 1972 version of The Last House on the Left, but I have seen Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, which served as the inspiration for Craven’s thriller, and given the majority opinion of Craven’s original makes me believe it is just as worthless as the 2009 remake. At the end of Bergman’s feature God “speaks” to the protagonists giving reason to the brutality that has been witnessed. At the end of the 2009 remake a head explodes giving reason to why the films of today don’t stack up to the classics and why today’s horrors rarely manage to do anything more than gross out an audience.
The Last House on the Left is the latest entry into the torture porn genre and a more-fitting genre I couldn’t imagine for this ill-conceived mess, which lacks any sense of motivation or intention. Such ignorance results in a film meant to merely show you horrific images originally meant to disturb you until it turns into a tale of revenge where you are expected to cheer on the prey as they become the predators.
The story begins as two young girls are kidnapped, raped and eventually murdered by an escaped convict, his girlfriend, brother and unwitting son. Following such pleasantries as a 44-year-old brutally raping a 20-year-old, the four brutes find themselves stranded in the woods and unknowingly seeking refuge in the home of one of the victims. Clues soon lead the parents down the path to what has happened, which is when they set out to take the law into their own hands and mangle the living hell out of the thugs sleeping in their neighboring guest house.
Nothing I have told you is all that terrible when it comes to horror films. It’s standard for the genre and is meant to be horrifying, but this isn’t horrifying, it’s pointlessly disturbing as two sweet parents ultimately become more despicable than the degenerates they are chasing. Horror films have turned into exercises in coming up with creative kills — the mindset appears to be the gorier the better — with little concern for the story being told or keeping consistency with the characters created. Last House on the Left meets all of these goals as the film ends and you don’t care about anyone except for the female victims and if they hadn’t been trying to score some weed at the beginning of the film none of it ever would have happened.
Finally, at the end of The Last House on the Left an additional scene begins to play. It doesn’t fit in with anything we have seen to that point and as an audience member you look on and think, “What the hell is going on?” The scene ends, the credits roll and you realize what you have just seen is a perfect example of why most horror films no longer resonate. It’s the goriest scene of the film and it plays like a deleted scene from an abandoned storyline. It’s blood-soaked and startling, but at the same time worthless, just as is this entire feature.
