Human the death dance.
While I can’t improve on Ebert’s ruminative review of the new version of The Last House on the Left, I can offer my own thoughts on it — mainly that I think it’s the best version of this material not made in Sweden while admitting that it still falls victim to the shortcomings that befell its forbearers. I have not seen Wes Craven’s Last House in many years, but I remember it as a product of its time, for better and worse. It’s a nasty and savage piece of goods, an inextricably timely document from when the peace and love movement went south, and it’s important to the development of the horror genre. But where similar roughness and budgetary tightness would, two years later, lend an uncomfortable sense of the genuine to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Craven’s film just looks cheap and inept, and any rhythm it builds is constantly undermined by the psychotic mood swings of the plot, especially whenever Craven cuts to the bumbling antics of a hapless hick sheriff and his dumbass deputy. The feeling I get is of a film that lucked into its importance, that wanted less to transmit a message and more to get its makers noticed; despite many claims to the contrary, any subtext or moral defensibility is likely accidental. (Craven would get this balance much righter with The Hills Have Eyes.)
Dennis Iliadis’s redux changes nothing of the original’s base structure, aside from the unexpected survival of Mari (which gets spoiled in pretty much all the film’s advertising so I’m not giving anything away). What it does do is strip away the extraneous white noise that marred the Craven film. All that remains is the bones of the story — setup, action, revelation, reaction, credits. Iliadis directs with a sharp eye and a ruthless sense of inevitability, dragging out the action as long as it needs to go without dulling the impact, and he’s helped by a game cast. Garret Dillahunt, in particular, cuts a chilling figure as Krug — where David Hess was a snarling stone psychotic, Dillahunt leans more towards lucid sociopathy. He gives all evidence that he understands his actions to be reprehensible and all evidence that he simply doesn’t give a fuck.
The choice to exclude anything that isn’t story-related gives the film a curious starkness, which is double-edged. There’s a certain level at which this cycle of defilement and revenge is taking place outside of society, made explicit in the scene where Martha MacIsaac’s Paige attempts her escape, only to be stopped short at the outskirts of a refinery; the level of violence attended by both parties (the attackers and the revenging parents) demands a step away from social normality into savagery, so isolating the characters in their own world works on a metaphorical level, emphasizing their break with the moral everyday. Problematically, though, it also makes the film a hermetic, self-contained object whose only reference point is itself. The Devil’s Rejects, to use one example, managed a narrative about revenge and the corrupting influence of violence without choking the real world out of the picture, and that move (floating the very idea of collateral damage) makes it all the more potent a statement.
This really gets at the heart of why any iteration of Last House is doomed to be unsuccessful without a total overhaul, or at least a return to the painful angst of Bergman — it’s crafted in such blunt, us-vs.-them terms. It is the level-one revenge narrative defined, forgoing complexity for primal satisfaction; the bad guys deserve what is coming, and the parents’ vengeance is a righteous one. Craven’s films, when you hold them to the light, betray a thick streak of conservatism, and I’m not using this as a cudgel with which to beat the film (horror, with its emphasis on destroyed innocence and vanquishing of monsters to regain the status quo, is a fundamentally conservative genre), I’m merely pointing out the family-values intent behind the grue. The stripped-down nature of the remake’s screenplay only makes this more overt, as does Mari’s survival and struggle back to the homestead. The dynamic shifts subtly — it’s not just a revenge for a grievous wrong, it’s a violent reclamation of the American family unit. We are all locked in a death struggle against outside forces who would destroy our way of life, Last House argues, and all means are okay for dealing with them. It’s forceful but a bit cheap minus ambiguity, which is far from the script’s stock in trade. It goes a long way to explain why, for all the polish and improvement over the source, Iliadis’s film still feels flat and deterministic.
Also: The microwave scene is completely retarded. However, as it plays, it at least displays a basic recognition of its retardedness, of its function as a meat-for-the-crowd climactic flourish, and thus works as a hilarious over-the-top punchline.
