Sticking with the spooky season theme, tonight I watched Wes Craven's directorial debut, The Last House on the Left (1972).
Serious Content Warning on this one, I'm going to talk about sexual assault a whooole bunch in this review, so hold on to your butts.
Holy Shit this was a weird movie. Wes Craven's first picture is a bewildering nightmare amalgamation of exploitation, horror, and slapstick comedy that I am struggling to wrap my brain around. I had picked up the basic plot of this film through cultural osmosis long ago, but this was my first time actually seeing it. I feel like I need to set up the context of the movie before I start talking about it, because on the surface of it, this is an ugly, heinous, offensively edited trainwreck of a film, but I am pretty sure that was the intended effect.
The plot of the film is loosely based on Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, of which Craven is a big fan. The idea for the film came from Craven's desire to present a shocking tale of violence, like in that film, but without the sterilization and glorification of the violence that he viewed as common in film at the time (in particular he apparently felt that the way Westerns portray violence as a force for good was damaging to Americans' ability to understand the Vietnam war). So he set out to make a hardcore pornographic film that depicted rape, assault, and murder in as realistic a fashion as possible, to pull the gauze away from his audience's eyes, as it were, and give them a taste of what violence actually looks like. He did not end up making that version of the film, which is probably for the best. What he did make is still devastatingly uncomfortable to watch, and it mostly accomplishes the goal of producing a watchable film that depicts its violence realistically without making it pornographic.
The actual plot of the movie begins on Mari Collingwood's (Sandra Peabody) 17th birthday. She and her friend Phyllis (Lucy Grantham), a queer-coded girl from the wrong side of the tracks, that Mom disapproves of, are going to go see a show to celebrate. We get to see a bit of Mari's fairly happy home life, with her mother Estelle (Cynthia Carr) and father John (Richard Towers) gifting her a golden peace-symbol necklace before she runs off to meet Phyllis in the woods.
The two girls run around by a picturesque river, share a bottle, and talk about their lives in what, to me, is a pretty clearly budding sapphic romance. It's not made explicit, but the chemistry between the two girls is easy and flirty, and they each represent countercultures that were becoming more accepting of sexual non-conformity at the time, the Hippies and the Punks. Having two young women at the center of the story rather than a hetero couple does a lot to ground the violence; you are never expecting the musclebound male lead to come rescue the damsel in distress. In fact, the police officers who appear in this movie are subjects of mockery and ridicule both by characters within the film, and the film itself. The message is clear: real violence is ugly and terrifying, often you cannot make a hollywood escape at the last moment, and help doesn't always arrive on time.
As the girls make their way towards the venue, we are introduced to the villains of the piece, a quartet of scum led by Krug (David Hess). Krug is male violence incarnate. He is insatiable. He imposes himself on everyone and everything around him, taking exactly what he wants and leaving only wreckage behind him. He is joined by his son, Junior (Marc Sheffler) whom he has gotten hooked on Heroin in order to better control, Weasel (Fred J Lincoln) the knife-wielding pedophile, and Sadie (Jeramie Rain) the bisexual sadist. The performances by these mostly first-time actors are bizarre at times, but gripping throughout. David Hess' Krug in particular is a force of nature that reminds me of a Stanley Kowalski type turned up to 11. Junior is used and abused by the three others, and it is he who lures the girls into their crash pad with the lure of cheap grass (himself desperate for his 'fix').
What follows is a deeply uncomfortable sequence in which the girls are tormented, and Phyllis raped, while Mari is made to watch. This is the first part in the film that we get to experience the insane tonal whiplash that will characterize the rest of the runtime. Phyllis' assault and the molestation of Mari are intercut with Mari's parents flirting and canoodling set to comic music. This juxtaposition will continue throughout, with slapstick gags and utterly inappropriate banjo music cut directly into the most graphic sexual violence in the film. An extended gag is made of the cops who are investigating Mari's disappearance trying to catch a ride after running out of gas, with everyone they meet trolling the shit out of them for being cops. It's a confounding choice, because on the one hand, portraying the ineffectiveness of the police force does seem to tie into Craven's larger ethos about realistic violence, but the actual comedic framing (and the horrifically tonally dissonant music, seriously what the fuck?) are just so bizarre because they are juxtaposed with the most serious elements of the film's violence in a way that makes it seem like the violence is part of the joke.
The morning after they are assaulted, the girls are bundled into the trunk of the gang's car, and they hit the road. Krug has sex with Sadie in the car full of people, with the top down, as Weasel asks him what the 'sex-crime of the century' might be. Sadie quotes some rad-fem literature (she has a quirk where she mispronounces words, having only read them and not heard them sploken, that is actually an incredible bit of characterization for an otherwize sterotypically psychotic character) and eventually the car breaks down just up the road from Mari's house.
What follows is even more graphic rape and torture of the two girls, involving escalating acts of humiliation, including forcing the two girls to perform sex acts on one another (this is another scene which I think strengthens the sapphic narrative, as Phylis, the more experienced and queer-coded girl, comforts and directs Mari. Mari also seems far more devastated by this than any of the other assaults to her person, making me feel that the corruption of her feelings for Phylis are an intended reading of the abuse taking place, although Phyllis does call Sadie a dyke at one point, so who really knows where this movie's sexual politics are really meant to lead?). Eventually, Phyllis engineers an opportunity to escape, and give Mari an opportunity to run as well. She makes a valiant attempt, but is ultimately killed by the gang. In the goriest shot in the film the gang pull her intestines out and play with them as a group.
While Phylis is running for it, Mari tries a different tactic. Left alone with Junior she tries to appeal to him, to befriend him, and to get him to take her to her parents' home. Her efforts might have succeeded had the others not returned before she could wheedle him down. Krug rapes Mari once more, in the most graphic assault of the film. It is immediately followed by jaunty banjo music that made me actually shout "what the fuck?" at my screen. The gang+Mari look almost as lost as I felt in that moment. They all stand and sort of shuffle around, only briefly meeting eachothers' eyes, until Mari begins to pray, and walk into the river. Krug takes a pistol from Weasel and guns her down, with her body floating in the water like the painting of Ophelia.
We then crash headlong into another slapstick bit involving the cops trying to catch a ride on a chicken truck from an old lady who could not give less of a fuck about them. It's an objectively funny bit, but it is so, so jarring that it exists in this movie at all, much less as an immediate follow-up to the death of our leading lady.
The next that we see the gang, they have found Mari's parents' house and convinced them that they are just travellers experiencing car trouble. The parents offer to let them stay the night, until the mechanic opens in the morning. I should note that throughout the film so far characters keep commenting on the status of the phones at the house, informing us that they are 'still out' or 'just came back' in an order that left me entirely unable to tell when and whether they had phone access at all. To simplify that headache, Weasel simply cuts the phone line in this scene, and we're done worrying about it.
The next segment of the film involves the gang getting antsy and the parents putting together what has happened to their daughter, with Estelle eventually discovering Mari's necklace in Jr's possession, and bloodstained clothes in the gang's bags. We are treated to a sequence where John sets up a fairly complicated booby trap, as well as just spraying some shaving cream on the floor outside the gang's door, and Estelle seduces Weasel, drawing him away from the house. I won't mince words here, she bites his dick off. It is undoubtably the best moment in the film. I could see it coming from a mile away, and I still cheered when she did it. This is the first moment in the entire film where Craven's ethos starts to come together. The disdain for the police, and the hammering home of the banality of violence has led to this, the only glorified acts of violence in the film, where a middle-aged couple absolutely annihilate a gang of rapists and murderers. This is the film at its most Grindhouse, and yet, it's also the most conventional action in the whole thing. It feels almost like the third act to a real horror movie, and not whatever fever-dream this flick has been for the prior hour.
Just before the actual revenge plot kicks in, we get a fake-out that made me squirm in my seat. Weasel dreams that he has been awoken by the Doctors Collingwood, who proceed to chisel out his teeth with a hammer. That dream sequence I'm pretty sure is the kernel that eventually grew into Freddy Krueger and the whole Nightmare on Elm Street concept.
There is a fight between John and Krug that roams throughtout the house, and it gave me intense Clockwork Orange vibes, Hess is fully unhinged at this point, bleeding from birdshot in his shoulder, and goading the older man into swinging at him. There is a split-second moment where you can see a man standing in a doorframe behind the two men, as Krug advances of the wounded John, which I thought was a crew member accidentally in the shot. Instead, that tiny, tiny moment serves as the establishing shot which leads into Jr appearing behind Krug with Weasel's gun (There are tiny moments of technical brilliance like this peppered all throughout the film). There is a tense standoff, and for a moment there is hope that Jr will break free from his father's abusive hold over him, and try to atone for what he's done, but it passes, and Krug bullies his own son into suicide.
We get to see John's booby trap pay off, and Krug meets an appropriately grizzly end, hacked apart by a chainsaw (This film somehow does chainsaw violence better than the actual Texas Chainsaw Massacre...) while Estelle slashes Sadie's throat in the pool. The cops finally show up, just as John is jamming the motorized blade into the helpless, terrified Krug, and merely stand around, utterly incapable of rendering any kind of aid.
The film ends there, and that would be fine, if it didn't immediately jump back into that goddamn banjo music, and roll credits over freeze-frames of the cast that are directly out of some old sitcom. It is so jarring and inappropriate, I honestly could not tell you what the fuck Wes Craven was thinking when he edited this thing. And he did. He wrote, directed, and edited it himself, which is the only way a movie like this ever gets made.
On the subject of the music, there is a sort of 'theme song' called The Road Leads Nowhere that plays at several points throughout the movie. It's a folksy kind of tune with melancholy lyrics, and it's the bit of music that fits the scenes it's used in the most often (although still not always). Apparently that song was written and performed by David Hess, which adds a whole new layer to scenes where it is used, if you imagine it as something of an internal monologue that Krug is experiencing.
I have gone back and forth on how to rate this thing so many times, and I am still not confident in my decision. I think I enjoyed watching this movie, on balance. I was variously gripped, confused, revolted, and actually offended (something that does not often happen to me while watching a film) by the utterly bizarre experience of watching this one, and I think parts of it are just badly made, but other parts are crafted with a care and sensitivity that it makes it hard to write this off as pure exploitation trash. There is a kernel of solid gold at the heart of this thing, but it is totally buried beneath a toxic, cancerous mass of deliberate, in-your-face provocation. I am going to give this one 2.5/5 stars. This is definitely not the best horror movie ever made, but it's certainly not the worst. I don't think I'd ever want to see it again unless I was showing it to a group of friends or something though.