LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT — SHOCKTOBER!

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Wes Craven's debut film is everything wrong with exploitation cinema. Mean spirited to its core, this film's overriding theme seems to be that society is broken up into three categories: killers, victims, and witnesses.

Amateur filmmaker Craven switches tone between horrific sexual abuse, lighthearted comedy, and hippie crushing thriller.

Schlock.

Just ugly.

Actor David Hess's folk guitar songs point in a dead-end direction. Hess takes a piss at Led Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven" with a too often repeated song that states, "And the road leads to nowhere."

I suppose it is fitting for such a piece of shit movie.

David Hess plays Krug, a cigar-chomping killer living out his perverted obsessions on two hippie girls that Krug and his "family" kidnap to torture. 

Wes Craven reworks Ingmar Bergman's significant "Virgin Spring" into something cruel and disgusting.

The specter of the Viet Nam War only hangs over the movie with the thinnest of threads.

The sexual abuse and murder scenes are treated without regard to any meaningful subtext. This is a movie without a soul.

There is no social commentary to be found. This is exploitation for exploitation sake.

Gene Siskel put it succinctly in his review of the movie.

"My objection to The Last House on the Left is not an objection to the graphic representations of violence per se, but to the fact that the movie celebrates violent acts, particularly adult male abuse of young women ... I felt a professional obligation to stick around to see if there was any socially redeeming value in the remainder of the movie and found none."

Rated R. 84 mins.

ZERO STARS

KING OF NEW YORK — CLASSIC FILM PICK

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You don't know intense.

You think you saw some cool shit in "The Matrix." And all of those dumbass superhero movies are just so fucking dope. Cough.

Fuck all that.

Abel Ferrera cooks on all four burners to create a Manhattan set neo-noir like none other.

Ferrera goes toe to toe with Friedkin and Lumet for insanity level. The car chase scenes on display are full throttle, and not a dot of CGI.

Gritty, raw, sexy, and full of '90s era NYC music and drug culture, "King Of New York" goes all the way there and then some.

Ferrera paces this ego-fueled crime drama like the Cannonball Run.

Look it up.

Someone could lose an eye, or considerably more. Many lose everything.

The '90s era New York City cocaine trade brings a lot of dirty money into the city.

Christopher Walken does indeed walk on water as Frank White, a recently released prison inmate drug kingpin. Frank does business out of the Plaza Hotel — located in the exact center of the Universe, bitches. Frank wants to finance a bankrupt hospital in the Bronx.

Oh, the humanity Frank White possesses.

Ferrera pulls no punches in this all out street brawl between Frank and the rest of the world.

Needless to say, shit hits the fan every step of the way.

You will be in awe of this movie.

You will need a stiff drink after seeing it. Perhaps two cocktails are in order.

"King Of New York" lives up to its over the top title.

I'm not even gonna drop names of this astounding cast. Well, okay, just one...Janet Julian.

Off the hook good.

Cheers!

Clink.

You front like you want Cinema, well this is it kids.

Thank you, and you're welcome.

Sign up for the Criterion Channel; your life will be better.

Rated R. 104 mins.

 

D.O.A. — CLASSIC FILM PICK

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ColeSmithey.com

Cinema doesn't get much more tightly wound than the anxious premise for Rudolph Maté’s film noir standard-bearer. A mussed-up man stumbles into a Los Angeles police precinct and tells the chief he wants to “report a murder,” his own.

What follows is the poor guy’s explanation of the previous day’s events, which will leave him a corpse by the end of movie. “D.O.A.’s” flashback storyline was a bold innovation when it came out in 1950, one of the 20th century’s most seminal years for world cinema. “All About Eve,” “Gun Crazy,” “Rashomon,” “Los Olvidados” and “Sunset Boulevard” were all released the same year.

Rudolph Maté was a renowned cinematographer of Polish descent whose work on “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (1927) and “Gilda” (1946) established his first-class reputation. For “D.O.A.” Maté made clever use of locations in San Francisco and Los Angeles to add to the story’s potent sense of urgency. Scenes of his lead character running through crowded sidewalks were shot guerrilla-style without permits. His memorable use of interiors in the now-famous Bradbury building in Los Angeles illustrates Maté’s ingenious ability to instill noir’s shadowy elements from Art Deco designs.

Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) runs his own business as a small-time accountant in the desert town of Banning, California. Mr. Bigelow carries on an affair with his emotionally suffocating secretary Paula (Pamela Britton), a blonde with more sense than he gives her credit for. A weeklong vacation in San Francisco promises to give Frank a chance to sew a few wild oats — with Paula’s bluffing permission — if he is to give any serious consideration to a romantic future with her.

In a tip to the atomic age, during Frank’s first night in Frisco, a mysterious man slips him a radioactive mickey at a “jive” bar that features fiery jazz music played by an all-black band for a crowd of rowdy white “jive-crazy” fans. Maté’s depiction of San Francisco’s delirious jazz scene provided cinema’s first look at what would be termed the Beat Generation by the end of the decade.

Diagnosed the next day as only having “a day or two days — a week at the most” to live, Frank goes on an all-out rampage to track down the man who “murdered” him and carry out his revenge.

A high-concept movie before there was such a thing, “D.O.A.” foreshadowed the poisoning of (possibly) Yasser Arafat and (definitely) Alexander Litvinenko — via polonium-210 — by a half-century.

Although the movie stumbles through a checklist of well-worn film noir clichés like fumbling for change at the bottom of an ill-kept purse, its poison MacGuffin keeps the audience on tenterhooks right up to the final frame when the police captain stamps “D.O.A.” on a missing person’s report. Like any great film, “D.O.A.” keeps its promise.

Not Rated. 83 mins.