Review: Last House On The Left (1972)
Image credit Joe Daly 2023
In the spirit of my feature on grindhouse cinema’s timeless love affair with rock and roll, I picked one of my favorite grindhouse films to review, as Halloween creeps ever closer…
And so we discuss the sinister masterpiece that is Last House on the Left, a visceral carnival ride of gritty revenge cinema, churning the delicate sensibilities of the meek into a frothy, turbulent sea of revulsion. This grindhouse monolith, erected by the fevered hands of maestro Wes Craven, emerged from the primordial soup of exploitation cinema not merely as film, but as a full-sensory voyage into the darkest and chilliest recesses of the human soul.
Released in 1972, the spirits of Woodstock had fled screeching back into Yasgur’s woods while the ghosts of Altamont raged across a landscape of bad trips, violent uprising and mass paranoia. Charging hard into this sea of dissent, Craven uncorked this jaw-dropping descent into murder and revenge that tested the sensibilities of even the hardened horror buff at the time. Last House… tells the story of two suburban girls who go into the city for a rock concert only to be abducted by a marauding gang of sadistic escaped convicts and their depraved girlfriend. The girls are savagely raped and murdered. The horrors inflicted upon them echo through the annals of cinema, leading us through a gauntlet of visceral torment that'd make Dante rethink his circles. Then, in a coincidence that even the killers find extreme, the gang ends up spending the night at the home of one of the girls' parents. And there begins the payback.
In the cruel and capable hands of Craven, a tale emerges as ancient and timeless as the hills, yet injected with a venom so potent that it leaves the mind paralyzed with dread and fascination. Having endured the horrors visited upon the two girls, only a rhapsody of revenge will balance the karmic scales and the result is a symphony of violence that is both shocking and deeply satisfying. Craven takes a nail-studded bat to the lower back of mainstream cinema, challenging viewers to reckon with the darkness that dwells not only on the screen but within ourselves. It's a tale that teeters on the edge of morality, rejecting badly-eroded notions of justice while making the Marquis de Sade look like a Girl Scout in comparison. To watch this film is to be transported to a debauched carnival of the soul, where the freak show is humanity itself.
Last House on the Left is not for the faint-hearted or those whose knees buckle when walking past a mobile Blood Drive truck; it exists for the fearless voyager thirsting for the nectar of pure, cinematic adrenaline. This unrelenting tableau of horror sinks its claws deep, dragging viewers through the mud and grime of human depravity, only to emerge, gasping and transformed, under a moonlit sky painted with streaks of insanity.
For those who have yet to pop some corn and enjoy the 1972 original, then settle in with all of the joyous trepidation and perverse delight that your beating black heart can hold. You will experience many feelings, but disappointment won’t be among them.