Review: Last House On The Left (2009)

The remake of Wes Craven’s classic 1972 low-budget gut churner gets itself into trouble almost immediately in an early sequence. Krug (Garret Dillahunt) is on his way to jail when his very own Manson Family (a wild-child girlfriend and slithering brother) spring him. But a successful escape doesn’t satisfy these sickos and rather than call it a day and run like hell, they pause to sadistically murder two police officers already injured way beyond being able to give chase. Within the first few minutes the full horror of what this vicious crew is capable of unfolds.

But the best horror unfolds slowly. This is what made the first half of the original so watchable (the second half is even better). We knew the 1972 gang was dangerous only through radio reports, but when we meet them they’re obviously twisted but also rather buffoonish. Even the girls don’t take them seriously when they’re first kidnapped. Because we haven’t seen with our own eyes what the kidnappers are truly capable of, until the final, awful moments we hold on to the idea that the girls might be let go or even outwit their captors. Unlike the remake, the visceral is emotional, not visual. The horror comes from the death of hope and the slow realization that this depraved nightmare isn’t going to end.

When it comes to horror, there’s good dread and there’s bad dread. The former is the fun version when you put your hands over your eyes dreading what’s coming next. The latter is when you just want the punishment to end so you can go home, which unfortunately defines the redo of “Last House on the Left.”

Dad (Tony Goldwyn), Mom (Monica Potter), and daughter Mari (Sara Paxton) head out to their beautiful but secluded lakeside home. Mari can’t wait to get away. Mom’s not too sure, but Dad gives her the car keys and some spending money so she can hang out with her local friend Paige (Martha Maclsaac). Paige is a little wilder than Mari, who’s given up some earlier bad habits to concentrate on swimming, but when Justin (Spencer Treat Clark – Bruce Willis’ son in “Unbreakable”), a shy, troubled boy their age, overhears Paige wish she had a little weed, he offers to hook them up.

He takes them to a local motel and they get high and just start to bond when the Manson Family walks in. Seems Justin is Krug’s son. On the run and with their pictures on the front page of every newspaper, the girls can’t be set free. The original idea is to take them along as hostages, but things happen that I won’t spoil and the nightmare begins.

The central and most controversial is scene is a horrific and relentless rape that’s both exploitative and gratuitous. After all, we can’t hate these people any more than we did in the opening sequence and so there’s no dramatic purpose to serve. In the original, this scene is much uglier, still gratuitous but actually serves a couple dramatic purposes (it’s also the second rape, the first happens earlier off camera). The competence of the staging and shooting of the moment also works against the remake. Instead of the documentary feel of the cheapie original that only heightened the you-are-there horror, this feels slick – like someone’s doing it because they can, not to move the story or deepen the drama.

**Spoilers coming**

Things improve somewhat when the killers, without knowing it, look for shelter from the storm in the home of Mom and Dad. You don’t need me to tell you this makes for some tense moments. But after a promising beginning this sequence eventually falters and falls prey to the tropes of the genre: Dark house, stormy night, electricity out, phones not working — and to heighten the horror, Mom and Dad doing a lot of dumb things like splitting up when they shouldn’t but of course returning just in time to save the day with a potted plant or some such thing.

The best scene is a prolonged killing where every gruesome household item you can imagine (and a few you can’t) comes into play. The taking of this life is long, bloody brutal, mostly silent and probably inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s “Torn Curtain” (1966) where the master decided to show audiences how difficult it is to kill a man with a protracted sequence involving Paul Newman that ends (if memory serves) with Wolfgang Kieling’s head in a gas oven.

Ultimately, for this kind of film to pay off – meaning, for all the nastiness we’ve been forced to watch to be worth it – the revenge scenes must make it worthwhile. We have to feel for the parents and also feel the sweet release of watching bad guys get what they got coming. But this never happens. There’s one moment where Dad girds Mom for battle and you think it’s finally on, but it’s a feint. What I wanted was to see was the parents plan, plot, scheme, grab control, turn the tables, and then without a hint of mercy take those bastards down one by one for what they did to those girls. Instead we get the standard dark, scary house – cat and mouse nonsense, you can see most every night on the Lifetime Network.

The usual-usuals are predictably up in arms over the film’s violence as though “Last House” achieves some sort of new low when in reality there’s nothing more graphic here than watching a 13 year-old Linda Blair masturbate with a crucifix in “The Exorcist” (1973). In fact, the murder/rape scene in the original is much harsher, involving the worst kind humiliation before the rape, which is even more sadistic. The problem isn’t what’s shown or done on screen, the problem is that the film is such a dramatic failure that the brutality feels as though it’s there for the sake of brutality. Piously railing against violence is missing the point. A better approach might be to advocate for better movies.