Last House on the Left (1972)

Getting back to Wes Craven, I finally saw his first horror film, Last House on the Left, which is something of a touchstone to modern-day horror films. It was improbably based on an Ingmar Bergman film (The Virgin Spring), and although is very cheap and crude looking, manages to instill a level of dread about the state of humanity that still has power.

Craven began his career making porn films, and Last House on the Left looks like a porn film from the era, shot in 16 millimeter and with some clumsy edits and terrible acting. But one can see a glimmer of Craven's talent in the nihilistic approach to the subject. A girl about to celebrate her 17th birthday, Mari, leaves her rural home to go to a concert in the big city (she's seeing a band called Bloodlust). When she and her girlfriend go looking to buy some pot, they run into a quarter of thrill-killers, led by a guy named Krug Stillo (David Hess).

The girls are abused in an apartment in the city, and then dumped in a trunk and driven, in a remarkable coincidence, to Mari's neighborhood, where the car stalls. The killers take the girls out to the woods for sexually deviant activities, and then kill the girls. Mari's parents, who are wondering where she is, accept the killers into their home when they claim to have car trouble. The parents will eventually find out they killed Mari, and exact revenge.

Last House on the Left is a short film, about 80 minutes, but still seems padded. There are long scenes of the two girls frolicking in the woods (they pull up a bottle of Boone's Farm out of a creek) and then another long scene of two of the killers chasing Mari's friend. Also there are some completely incongruous comic scenes of a pair of bumbling policemen, and the music, also by Hess, are a mixture of bad folk ballads and upbeat banjo music. The mind reels.

This was a sensational picture for its time, with tales of people vomiting, having heart attacks, and attacking the projection booth in an attempt to take the print. Today it doesn't seem so shocking, although I can see why it earned its reputation. There's a very brief scene after on of the girls is killed of her being disemboweled, and Mari's mother gets revenge on one killer by biting off his penis (that actor is Fred Lincoln, who went on to a prolific career directing adult films).

Last House on the Left is not trash, as it might appear to be, but I don't think it has the gravitas that Craven or its greatest admirers think it has. Craven, in an interview on the DVD, cites the Vietnam War as a motivation for the film. Um, maybe, but in the end it's a movie designed to titillate (their are flashes of nudity) and repulse.