Most horror fans are aware that the plot of this shocker is borrowed from Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, although the producer of Last House, Sean Cunningham, prevaricates even at this late date by claiming their source was the same Scandinavian folk tale that Bergman used. There's thirty years' worth of lore surrounding this film, from the "It's Only a Movie" tagline, to the ballyhoo suggestion that the movie had value as a warning lesson for parents to teach their children.

Last House is very frightening. Its first two-thirds, before we get to the Collingwood house, is very well made. The acting is excellent, and extremely believeable, especially David Hess and his ferocious partners. Although it began as an 'adult' movie made by adult filmmakers (Cunningham again sidesteps when he claims his previous softcore and borderline hardcore work as being 'documentary'), Wes Craven's conception of the worst possible horror scenario has a legitimate artistic basis. A growing number of recent mainstream films, like The Wild Bunch, had expressed the boiling violence of the times; I believe Craven when he says his cinematic atrocities were his reaction to the turmoil of Vietnam, Charles Manson, the '60s assassinations, and Richard Nixon's America. In 1971, the country was a pressure cooker that some radicals believed would actually spiral into revolution. Many Americans were terrorized by the thought of a rising tide of violence.

Charlie Manson laughed at the establishment, predicting that its own children would 'come at them with knives', in retribution for society's hypocrisy. An extension of Manson anxiety, Krug and Co. are America's worst nightmare, an alternate family of sex killers and dope addicts, a fusion of sick personalities who encourage the worst in one other. They have free sex. They sell drugs. They're completely out of control. Mari and Phyllis' very innocence triggers Krug's lust to defile and destroy, to outrage even himself.

Most everyone's been intimidated, maybe even threatened, by the kind of bullies or toughs who turn their own fears and powerlessness into aggression. Krug and Co. express their rage by wielding power over helpless victims. We get the feeling that their desire to give Mari and Phyllis 'the works' is an explosion of hatred that's built up over months of simmering hostility. It's premeditated only in that the killers know that they're going to have themselves a party. Everyone knows that to have fun at a party, one needs to let go and express oneself.

Craven knew that terror is in the details, and that's why he adds the disturbing incident where Phyllis is made to urinate on herself. A familiar captivity fantasy is the standard situation where the reader or viewer measures his or her inner strength against how the characters of a drama stand up to torture. When Phyllis pees herself on demand, Krug and his fiends are teaching her a lesson in power - whatever they want her to do, she'll have to do. Breaking the mild taboo of public urination is in itself a relatively tame humiliation, but there's a line that's been crossed. Ever have a boss, or a 'friend', insist you do something just for the principle of demonstrating who's in charge? Phyllis and Mari are undergoing that, but the horror shared by all is that both victim and tormentor know the stakes will soon escalate.

The torments in Last House are direct and pitiless, and covered with a documentary eye so passive, that it all could be real. Nothing is stylized, not even to the extent that the atrocities in something like Salo are 'aestheticized.' Phyllis and Mari are breathing, shivering, pleading girls one minute, and after an extended agony, dead meat. See what I can make you do? See what I can do to you?, they seem to be saying, but when their mutilated victims are dead, the killers collapse into sullen silence. They are beyond the pale, yet there remains a pitiful humanity in their nervous, self-disgusted 'regrouping' after their crime.

Nothing's perfect, certainly not an overreaching shocker like The Last House on the Left. Craven's plan of bringing the horror full circle with the borrowed structure of The Virgin Spring is sound, but, unlike the later Tobe Hooper and Sam Raimi gorefests, his production doesn't have the basic technical sophistication for the third act at the Collingwood house. It's all interiors, which require experience to light. The cramped spaces force the footage to be broken up into more conventional angles, which don't have the docu veracity of the exteriors. Compared to the earlier section, big pieces of Last House's final reels are distractingly amateurish.

The 'Crime and Retribution' angle doesn't work too well. The random, senseless slaughter of the two girls is the kind of thing that happens too often to be ignored, and therefore has validity. But when the killers are delivered unto the Collingwoods for a payback slaughter, the show becomes a fantasy that teaches the wrong lesson, even if what happens is what we want to happen. The Collingwoods aren't Max Von Sydow and they don't pull heirloom swords from the attic and reforge them as weapons for a ritual slaughter. They're an average couple, who presumably haven't had survivalist & terror scenarios running through their heads for years (as many people do now, admittedly). When they respond with such cool killer instincts, it's a horror-comic gore fantasy entirely different than the raw realism in the woods.

True, a consistent finale would definitely not have been as thrilling for the audience. Krug and his fiends might believably escape direct punishment, even if convicted of other crimes. If they were caught, legalities would probably mandate a protracted, agonizing trial, as in The Onion Field. But The Last House on the Left is first and foremost an exploitation film - even the viewers sobered by the horror in the woods, respond like a vigilante mob in cheering the slaughter at the house. I wouldn't be surprised if Craven and Cunningham originally planned a more naturalistic variation on a Herschel Gordon Lewis film, and their superior cast inspired them to overachieve in the first section of the movie.

The extras are pretty flush. A documentary produced by author David Szulkin with MGM's Greg Carson features the producers and actors in fairly frank interviews. All comment on the impact of the film. Craven characterizes himself as being stoned half the time during shooting; although he was no kid, in the outtakes he looks like a longhaired art student. Cunningham, the 'documentary' filmmaker, tries to characterize his ambitions as loftier than they really were, and Savant thinks his allusions to Last House being a spiritual film like Bergman's, are mildly offensive.

Both producer and director talk on the engaging commentary, telling the story of the making of the film while poking fun at themselves. Both come off better here than in the docu - Craven has a wry sense of humor, and Cunningham is more open about the primitive level of production he was able to muster. Appropriately, they sober up somewhat around the area of the murder. It's obvious that Craven, at least, is still somewhat conflicted by his 'academic' exercise in horror.

The Outtakes section, for those who need to know, includes a lot of fake entrails-pulling that will either sicken or amuse. The short bits of film include a great many stage waits and post - "Cut" moments that happily show that the actors are just acting. It's a professional cast, even though most of the main players made very few movies (at least as listed in the IMDB). David Hess has a continuous list of acting credits, and Fred J. Lincoln became a prolific porn director - the list of titles he's directed is mind-blowing.

A third section called Forbidden Footage is not legendary gore cut from the film, but a discussion of the roughest scenes already in the movie, and plays like a chapter exiled from the docu. Lucy Grantham seems pleased that her urination scene was authentic. I don't think the extras show any excised footage (unless I missed some), but instead offer alternate or extended bits from the outttakes. (A couple of added bits, like a longer view of Junior's head wound, are in the docu as well). Savant happened to be in the post-production house during work on the extras and talked to the editor. He told me that there was a surfeit of gross and sexually-oriented outttake material that wasn't used, and I don't think he was pulling my leg.

The creepy house on the keep case cover has nothing to do with the movie, and indeed the rest of the packaging gives no indication of the strong content inside. Most smaller companies offer some kind of text warning on their gory or adult-oriented films, which might have been a good idea here. With its convincing, almost real scenes of personal agony, Last House has more impact than the average Italian Zombie gutfest.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor,
The Last House on the Left rates:
Movie: Good, but not recommended for any but fans of gore
Video: Good
Sound: Good
Supplements: Docu, Outtakes, 'Forbidden Footage', trailer and commentary track with Craven and Cunningham
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: August 1, 2002

4. There's Salo, again. Salo, for the uninitiated, is Pier Paolo Pasolini film in which a group of perverted fascists in Mussolini Italy (or perhaps post-Mussolini Fascist Italy) are given the children of executed Communists and other opposition parties, to dispose of as they will. Just as in Last House on the Left, the dozens of youths are humiliated and tormented in appalling horrid and unwatchable ways, individually, and in groups, and finally slaughtered in a circus of scalpings, eye-gougings, and the like. Unlike Last House, the carnage is all observed with a remote, aesthetic calm, often with gentle music playing. This abomination takes a strong stomach to watch and is an obvious political stab at conservative cruelty - Pasolini's most horrid effect is to have the assembled sadists watch the arena of death from far away, but using binoculars ... relishing the torment and agony, but at a genteel, refined distance.

Savant doesn't recommend Salo to anyone, but I have to admit that my attitude toward movie violence (and institutionalized torture killing) was altered by it. I have no patience with the glamorized, 'We Are the Champions' killings in Rambo or Schwartzenegger's films, or anything that smacks of cheerleading for aggression.