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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
