The Last House on the Left is a remake of the 1972 Wes Craven shocker. It’s a tale of two families. One is your average suburban household and the other has more in common with the Manson family.
The Collingwood family, parents John (Tony Goldwyn) and Emma (Monica Potter) with daughter Mari (Sara Paxton), has retreated to their lakeside vacation home. Mari takes the family car to go into town to meet up with her friend Paige (Martha MacIsaac). Mari and Paige meet Justin (Spencer Treat Clark), a teenager passing through town, and are invited back to his hotel room to enjoy some pot.
Unfortunately, they comply and meet up with Justin’s father Krug (Garrett Dillahunt), Krug’s brother Francis (Aaron Paul), and Krug’s girlfriend Sadie (Riki Lindhome). This new trio is of a bad sort and has recently broken out of police custody.
They decide to kidnap Mari and Paige, but when the two try and escape near the road to the vacation home it ends with the car being wrecked. Things just get worse as Paige is killed, and Mari raped. Mari manages to escape again, and Krug and company figure she is as good as dead.
The villains then seek shelter from a storm at the Collingwood house unaware who the parents are. Justin discovers the truth as a wounded Mari is found by her parents. Rather than escape and call the police, the couple decides to extract a bloody revenge on the ones who did this to their daughter.
From art house to the slaughterhouse might be an apt description of Last House on the Left. I say that because the original 1972 production was in part based on Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (based on a 13th century Swedish ballad). The 1972 original was known for its brutality and the remake certainly ups the ante in that regard (especially the unrated cut). There are some changes from the original. Two characters have their fates changed. They both die in the original, but in the remake they live. I’ll let you figure that out as not to spoil it for you.
This new production obviously has much more money than Craven even hoped to have in 1972. The underlying theme of revenge for harm to your family member still resonates (and I guess has been resonating since the 13th century and before). What the film provides is a bloody, gruesome realization of those themes.
Each one was a product of their time and the remake does provide a more glossy, better looking version of the 1972 film, which seemed grungy and low budget. Neither film is an easy one to watch. I’d hope you’d not let the kids anywhere near this one.
In our age of “torture porn” it may be fitting that the granddaddy of the genre is given a remake. It’s a well made film, offers suspense, but is still hard to watch some scenes. Even more so in the unrated cut.
Last House on the Left is presented in anamorphic widescreen (1.85:1) and is enhanced for 16x9 televisions. Special features are rather slim. You only get 9 minutes of deleted scenes and a 3 minute “Inside Look.”
Last House on the Left is still shocking, but may have been tempered by some of its other “torture porn” brothers and sisters. The film still has the ability to shock as you ponder what you’d do if one of your family members were to be harmed and you had the perpetrators in your home. I’d imagine that you’d not make them a cup of tea (unless it was laced with poison).
The Last House on the Left (2009) is now available at Amazon . It is available for pre-order at AmazonUK for an Oct. 19th release. Visit the DVD database for more information.
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