The Last House On the Left (1972)

Directed by Wes Craven

Viewed on Amazon Prime

 

As with Cannibal Holocaust, Last House on the Left has a huge reputation behind it as a shocking and divisive film. This was one of the earlier films of Wes Craven, the director of Nightmare on Elm Street, among other things, and I was really interested to see where he got his start. Because of the killer reputation that this movie enjoys as a shocking exploitation movie I prepared myself for something really disturbing. Because of that reason this is going to be a really spoilery discussion. There is no way to actually talk about the movie without just talking about it, so let’s get started!

The film focuses on Mari Collingwood, a young woman soon celebrating her seventeenth birthday, and her friend Phyllis Stone as they go out to celebrate Mari’s birthday at a concert in NYC. Mari’s mother worries about Mari’s friendship with Phyllis, as Phyllis is from the ‘bad part of town’, but the two go off regardless, drinking in the forest by Mari’s home and heading off to the city to kill some time before the concert and score some drugs. The drug scoring doesn’t go well though because the random stranger Phyllis approaches is an accomplice to two violent sexual predators who just broke out of prison. Lured upstairs by the promise of cheap high quality pot, Mari and Phyllis are quickly trapped by the group and subjected to torture and depravity.

Mari’s parents prepare the home for her return, while Mari and Phyllis are abducted and taken out of the city by the deranged group. The Collingwoods go to the police about the issue but are brushed off due to the timing of the disappearance with Mari’s birthday, while the criminal group abducting Mari and Phyllis has their car break down right outside of the Collingwoods’ home. Abandoning the car, the group proceeds to continue their brutal escapades in the woods. After finishing up, the group seeks shelter at the nearby house where the Collingwoods provide hospitality. Eventually the Collingwoods figure out what has transpired and take their revenge.

So the main problem I had with this movie is that I didn’t see it in 1972. There certainly is a lot of violence and brutality and cruelty in this film but in the forty six years since this has come out there have been so many other films to tackle these topics that have completely overshadowed this movie. Sure, the movie is upsetting in the way that things that are terrible happen to people who don’t deserve them to be happening to them, but beyond that I was never really shocked by anything that happened here. While I usually don’t harp on special effects too much, the lack of budget really hurt this movie, leaving it with effects that didn’t look right or shots that seemed like they should have had effects, blood or dismemberment, but didn’t have them. It made some scenes a bit hard to take seriously and made the movie feel less real and less shocking. Without the shock value that the movie had in the early 70s, there just isn’t that much here to keep me invested.

Plot, characters, comic relief, none of those elements of the movie worked for me in any real way. The plot is just so basic and simple and proceeds in such a direct linear fashion that I was just completely unengaged, and this is where this movie’s reputation may be hurting it for modern viewers. When this movie came out you didn’t know that the two girls would be just be raped and murdered by the brutal thugs who abducted them and you might have expected the wacky cops or Mari’s parents to show up at the last minute and save them or something but that never happens. I can imagine that being incredibly shocking to someone in 1972 watching a movie like this and expecting the good guys, the two innocent young women, to come out on top in the end and get away from the bad guys or even maybe turn the tables on them but that never happens. But I knew the reputation of the movie and I didn’t expect the young women to make it out unscathed so I wasn’t surprised when any of this happened and that made the movie a lot less interesting for me just because I always kind of knew what was going to happen next.

The only time things do get interesting is when the gang ends up staying with the Collingwood family. At first the Collingwoods don’t know who these people are or what they are responsible for but eventually they learn the horrible truth. After learning this the two decide to take vengeance upon the group and, after a bit of effort, do end up killing these people. The movie seems to be framing this retaliatory murder as a sort of mirror of the cruelty shown by the thugs but I don’t really see it that way. It is established several times that the phone lines at the house are dead and they are in the middle of nowhere with town being established as being close to a thirty minute drive away. They can’t call the cops and going there would give the group nearly an hour to realize that their hosts have left and then try and get away. Sure, maybe if they had done this then the cops could have caught up with them or found them in the woods but there is still a non zero chance that they’re going to just elude the cops and be free to keep raping and murdering. Maybe I’m just more vengeance minded than the average person from ‘72 but I don’t see this as an excessively cruel act. Especially because John Collingwood’s first plan to kill the leader of the gang, Krug, was to just shoot him in his sleep, a far kinder death than his daughter was allowed. In contrast Estelle Collingwood’s plan, to kill another of the thugs by having him tie his own hands together and then initiate sex and then bite off his penis and let him bleed to death, is insane but it worked and is still less cruel than what the recipient had done mere moments before this sequence.

Another issue is that the characters we see are mostly just stock characters. No one has an overabundance of personality so it was a little difficult for me to become attached to these characters or be horrified by their actions. That may have been the point, to establish all the protagonists as being just everyday normal people that anyone could relate to but that didn’t really connect for me that way. Again, it is a bit difficult to comment on what would have been considered normal at the time, maybe it was incredibly scandalous that Mari and Phyllis were trying to buy drugs and that was supposed to inform their characters, if so, fair enough. That doesn’t change for me that the villains are all incredibly one dimensional, except maybe Junior, the youngest and son of Krug, who struggles a bit with the evil done by his associates in between his bouts of heroin induced catatonia. In a lot of ways these characters feel like players in a morality tale rather than fully fledged people, and perhaps that was the intention.

Also there was a lot of weird comedy present. There’s a very strange sequence where a bumbling sheriff and his deputy have run out of gas on the highway and are trying to hitchhike their way up the road to stop the killers. This leads to several scenes of very strange comedy where the two try to finagle rides from a group of wacky characters and it feels incredibly out of place. There is also an oddly jaunty song about the murderers’ escapades and I can kind of see why these things were included here. I understand that the thought was probably to have some very light-hearted segments to contrast strongly with the darker parts of the film, which isn’t a terrible idea but it never worked for me because the tones shifted a little too much for me. The movie wasn’t light in the first act and heavy in the second and third, the comedy was just mixed in with the dark scenes and just felt a bit muddled.

Overall I guess the easiest thing to say would be that I just didn’t ‘get’ the movie the same way a lot of other people did, it just didn’t affect me the same way. I don’t even think its a bad movie, it is an important part of horror/exploitation history and I can see how this movie laid the framework for future movies, especially from Wes Craven, a director whose work I do generally like. As a movie though, I didn’t find it very exciting and for that reason I would not recommend this to an average viewer, except if they were interested in seeing it as a piece of history. If you were interested in it from that perspective though, then, of course watch it, this is a hugely influential film and if you’re really interested in horror films then you should see it at least once.