Back when I was a wealthy man, I had it all: twenty channels of HBO, a small, dirty apartment above a bar, all the spaghetti and Winco-brand spaghetti sauce I could force myself to swallow.
Unfortunately, I took the advice of parents and educators everywhere and invested in our future: the children. What they didn't tell me is those bright, shiny children depreciate into lazy, worthless adults. Left destitute, I can no longer afford the basic cable that's every American's birthright. At this point in my story, it's okay to cry.
There's one thing I still have: the priceless memory of all those HBO TV series. Deadwood, Six Feet Under, The Wire, that one show with the gangsters--I watched them all. Oh, I've got one more thing, too, a crippling addiction to the actors of those shows. Why crippling? Because now all those brilliant people have found second careers in cruddy Hollywood movies (The Reaping, Hitman, etc.). Since I love them all, and because my job makes me, I have no choice but to go see them. The Last House on the Left might not be awful, but it's one more reminder of how much better life used to be.
While vacationing with her family at their isolated lake house, Sara Paxton goes into town to spend the night with her friend. There, the two are kidnapped by Garret Dillahunt (of TV's Deadwood) and his crew of sociopathic killers. Paxton's effort to escape makes them crash their car in the woods, but there is no getting away.
Her friend is killed. Paxton is shot and left for dead. Seeking shelter from a storm, Dillahunt and his gang stumble onto Paxton’s parents’ house, where they’re allowed to sleep. But during their stay, Paxton crawls home, prompting her parents to seek a sadistic revenge.
I don't know what to think of the '70s anymore. Today's pop culture tells me they were one long joke, a decade of brambly sideburns and dorks in flammable clothing having coke-fueled dance-seizures to "Stayin' Alive," but if you watch the movies of the era, there was a lot of sick, brilliant talent running around. What does it say that Wes Craven's version of The Last House on the Left, shot way back in the Dark Ages of 1972--they hadn't even played golf on the moon yet!--is more disturbing than its modern remake?
Not to say the new one doesn't try. Fully aware you can't spell "graphic" without the "ick," director Dennis Iliadis puts together some of the most brutal sequences of murder and rape in recent history. (Remember, parents: movie tickets are still cheaper than babysitters.) Gnarly and savage, it's almost enough to make you doubt whether watching fake people get assaulted and traumatized is meant to be entertaining.
This was basically the point of the original--the gang does terrible, terrible things, making you hope they receive a vicious and justifiable comeuppance, but then the parents go so far in revenge it turns them into monsters, too.
That doesn't come across this time. Partly to blame is a case of the overdirections. It's not a constant thing, but often enough to be noticeable, thunderous musical cues command us to feel scared while cartoonishly evil performances alert us to the fact the killers are bad people who deserve bad things. As average contrary humans--with my media-eroded brain, I can only assume you're as stubborn and petty as I am--our natural instinct is to do the opposite: to be taken out of the tension while disbelieving in the gang as credible characters.
So who cares when they're ground up in the sink and flushed down the drain? They're not real people, no matter how real the violence being done to them looks. Their deaths don't end up meaning anything.
That doesn't ruin things (I mean, how can graphic violence be ruined?), it just makes The Last House on the Left a fairly long, generally tolerable piece of torture-porn that doesn't do much more than generate a couple visceral thrills before coming to a close. If that's not your thing, it's eminently skippable.
Grade: C+