Video Nasty #30 : Last House on the Left

Synopsis: On the eve of their daughter's seventeenth birthday the Collingwoods are preparing a surprise party whilst Mari, the birthday girl, is in the city for a gig. As they're raising the bunting and baking cake the parent's are blissfully unaware that their daughter has been kidnapped, abused and raped by a gang of escaped convicts led by Krug, the psychotic ring-leader. When the gang inadvertently seek shelter at the Collingwood's, the parents slowly realise that they are in the company of their daughter's murderers and, despite their seemingly harmless facade, go Old Testment on Krug and co.

It's remarkable how sometimes despite the constituent parts being unbalanced, un-conventional or even amateurish, a film can really get under you skin. The first time I watched Texas Chainsaw Massacre I distinctly remember a feeling of dread that stuck with me for a few days, as if the film had left a dirty imprint on my sub-conscious of leather-face waiting around every corner to drag me into a makeshift abattoir and hang me on a meat hook. Like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, despite its countless missteps and unconventionalities, Last House on the Left has a similar emotional resonance, albeit a more seedy and depressive funk.

Which is impressive, because there are countless elements in Last House that really shouldn't work. Whilst Wes Craven's idea of intercutting between the rape of Mari and the victim's parents preparing her party is crushingly effective, his attempts to intercut between a later rape scene and the comedy japes of the sheriff and his idiot sub-ordinate is excruciatingly embarrassing. Not only is the broad comedy incredibly insensitive when juxtaposed with scenes of abuse, it's also deeply unfunny (coincidentally an increasingly emphasis on comedy instead of horror is what ruined Craven's most famous creation - Freddy Krueger).


The odd mash of horror and variety-show lightheartedness is also evident on the soundtrack, with mixed results. The whimsical music accompanying some of the horrific acts works in an odd way, much like Kubrick's use of rousing classical music to score the old ultra-violent in Clockwork Orange. When the soundtrack doesn't work it's as embarrassing as the attempts at comedy, most notably the bluegrass/folk song chronicling Krug's exploits in the film.

Despite these missteps, Last House is a film that looks incredibly fresh, despite the fact it's almost 40 years old. Craven's cost-cutting idea of using a document crew gives the film an air of realism that makes every horrific act all the more believable, even during the parent's almost comic book revenge of emasculative fellatio and a fifty year old man setting home-alone style booby traps.

Craven and producer Sean Cunningham wanted to deliberately challenge Hollywoods consequence-free violence, and accordingly there's no hero in Last House. Everybody looses. The parent's revenge is ultimately self-defeating, as is painfully clear in the final shot of the film, the dejected parents standing in their destroyed home awaiting arrest. Their family unit is irreparably destroyed, and no amount of revenge will ever change that.


Like The Exorcist and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the film's long term ban is proof of its unnerving and distributing quality. As Mark Kermode points out, Deep Throat, a hardcore porn film in which the lead allegedly had a gun pointed at her head to perform, is released uncut, yet Last House on the Left was, up until 2002, not certified for release in the UK.

Last House on the Left is not a film I could recommend to anyone, apart from film students or a completist horror fan. Nethertheless, it's an important film, and for once, it's infamy and entry on the Video Nasty list is fully deserved.