Whenever anyone writes about the independent low-budget shocker The Last House on the Left, the word that is used most often to describe it is disturbing. On a short list of notorious horror movies, this one certainly ranks near the top, and there are numerous scenes that are absolutely justified in being described as "disturbing." Yet, if I were to pick one word that sums up the film as a whole, it would have to be uneven.

As powerful and unnerving as many of the sequences are in The Last House on the Left, overall it is a supremely schizophrenic movie, alternating awkward scenes of bad comedy with gruesome and unsettling moments of violence that reach a nasty level of documentary realism, all of which is covered by a folksy, guitar-heavy musical score that is so utterly out of place that it constantly threatens to turn the whole movie into a joke. Granted, there are elements of datedness to the music—it probably played better in 1972 than in 2002—yet even taking that into account, it is still wildly inappropriate most of the time. Take, for example, a scene in which a gang of killers is driving down an isolated rural road with two kidnapped teenage girls in the trunk of their car, one of whom has already been raped, and the soundtrack plays an upbeat folk song that not only features goofy lyrics about the killers, but uses a kazoo. A kazoo.

Having said all that, though, I will contend that The Last House on the Left is a much smarter and more serious film than many have given it credit for. In many ways, the film is so raw and rough-edged that it's hard to see it for what it is: a scathing indictment of violence in which bloodshed is always a dead end, whether for sadistic purposes or for those of seemingly justified retribution

Of course, The Last House on the Left would probably have been long forgotten except by the most serious devotees of exploitation films except that it was created by Wes Craven and Sean S. Cunningham, who would separately develop the two most lucrative horror franchises of the 1980s: A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th, respectively. Craven, who wrote and directed the film, was then a young college English professor moving into the world of filmmaking for the first time. In a move that might be described as either "brilliant" or "ridiculous," he used the basic narrative outline of Ingmar Bergman's mythopoetic parable The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan, 1960) and updated it to the era of the early '70s, in which the peace and love ethos of the late '60s was giving way to a culture torn between increasingly radical liberalism and a rising conservatism.

The story centers on two teenage girls, Mari Collingwood (Sandra Cassel) and Phyllis Stone (Lucy Grantham), who venture from their secluded suburban world in upstate New York to the big bad city to go to a rock concert. Looking to buy some marijuana, they find themselves ensnared by an escaped murder convict named Krug (David Hess) and his "family," which is clearly modeled on the Manson family. Krug's family members include the aptly named Weasel (Fred Lincoln), the animalistic Sadie (Jeramie Rain), and Krug's heroin-addicted teenage son, Junior (Marc Sheffler).

After capturing Mari and Phyllis, Krug and company keep them hostage in their dingy apartment (Phyllis is raped that night), and the next day drive them out to the country. In a rather strained bit of coincidence, their car breaks down right in front of Mari's secluded house, where her parents (Gaylord St. James and Cynthia Carr) are waiting for her to return. Krug and his gang drag Mari and Phyllis out into the woods and amuse themselves by humiliating, torturing, raping, and eventually killing both of them. This extended sequence in the woods is the film's most infamous, as it is constructed with an unblinking eye, showing how deeply one human can degrade another with violence. As film scholar Robin Wood has noted about the film, the violence here is unbearable because it so clearly reflects the violence inherent in human relationships—it allows for no distance or irony to make it more palatable.

The fact that this sequence is so protracted, allowing for several different instances of torture and humiliation and at least one near-escape makes it that much more difficult to stomach. The other reason it is so difficult to watch is that Craven doesn't shy away from the awkwardness and the bloodiness of the action, and he makes the murderers human by showing their own complicated revulsion at and fascination for what they have done. The killings have a slow, almost ritualistic feel to them, drawing out the inevitable even as each step closer to the actual murders becomes less and less enticing for the perpetrators.

At this point, it seems that the film's moral is clear: In standard cautionary-tale fashion, it tells us that pretty young girls who stray to the wrong side of the tracks will pay the price. However, that is just the set-up for the film's true intent. Once Mari and Phyllis have been killed, the film strains its coincidence even farther by having the four criminals stay at the home of Mari's parents that night. Mari's parents eventually figure out what has been done to their daughter, and they enact their revenge on Krug, Weasle, Sadie, and Junior, thus showing that they—respectable members of the upper class—are just as capable of the most vicious sorts of violence, which is the film's true goal.This is where The Last House on the Left differs sharply from another low-budget '70s shocker, Meir Zarchi's rape-revenge melodrama I Spit On Your Grave (1978). Unlike that film, Craven shows that the Collingwoods' violent retribution ultimately solves nothing; their daughter is still dead and, if anything, they have made it worse by denying their own humanity in slaughtering Krug and his minions. Craven underscores this by ending the film on a shot of Mr. and Mrs. Collingwood, blood-spattered and exhausted, but clearly defeated, not victorious. The film ultimately argues that a bourgeois family like the Collingwoods hasn't achieved respectability because it lacks the violent component of a "family" like Krug's, but simply because they have repressed it.

The reputation The Last House on the Left has acquired over the years has often overshadowed its intelligent and thoughtful look at violence. And, again, the film's general unevenness also contributes to a misperception of what the film is about, particularly the way Craven allows the story to meander back to a dim-writted police sheriff (Marshall Anker) and his even more dim-witted deputy (Martin Kove), whose Keystone Cop antics belong in another movie entirely. Craven may have realized the severity of much of the film's imagery and wanted to lighten it up by interspersing some physical comedy, but the resulting uneven tonal shifts do little but make it difficult to take the film as seriously as its ideas demand that it be.

Copyright © 2002 James Kendrick