Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.
Today’s theme: 1970s
Sure, my pick for today’s 1970s theme isn’t groundbreaking. But it’s a blind spot.
Sure, I’ve seen every movie that stole its poster design from this film. I’m wearing a The House That Vanished shirt as I write this. I love that Bay of Blood is also called Last House on the Left – Part II, Last House – Part II and New House on the Left.
I’ve seen the movies inspired by it: Last Stop on the Night Train, House On the Edge of the Park, Last House On Dead End Street, The House by the Lake, Hitch-Hike, The Last House On the Beach, Madness…I have seen all of them.
I even watched the remake!
There’s no explanation why I have this huge blind spot. So let’s fix that.
Maybe it’s because I am ambivalent, at best, about Wes Craven. But I’ve tried to separate those feelings and experience this as a new movie. And you know what? I get it.
Even the parts people hate, like the wacky music and the goofy cops. It’s ramshackle and kind of all over the place, but it just plain works. When it gets into its meanness —which was unexpected at the time, but now he’s in it today, making you just wait for it— it goes for it in a way that few movies do.
Sean Cunningham made his directorial debut with The Art of Marriage, which came to the attention of Hallmark Releasing. His next film, Together, was an improved take on his first. Wes Craven worked on the film, and he and Cunningham had the opportunity to discuss making movies. They were given a bigger budget to make this, and it was intended to be a hardcore roughie of sorts. Before filming, it was decided to abandon that idea and just make a movie that could play in regular theaters.
We think of elevated horror as a new thing, but Craven wanted to base this on the Swedish ballad “Töres döttrar i Wänge,” which inspired Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. This sounds good for the press, you know?
Other than Eleanor Shaw and Sandra Peabody, no one was a professional actor. Well, Fred Lincoln did adult. But maybe that also worked in this film’s favor. Peabody said, “I was upset because I’m an emotional person, and I reacted to what was going on as if it were real. I had a tough time with some of the scenes because I had come out of American Playhouse, where it was all about preparation, and everything had to be real. I ended up doing a horrible job in the film. I was distraught, and I felt like I should have channeled that, but I couldn’t… I was a young actress, and I was still learning to balance any emotions I had from outside of the film into my scene work.” Like a real-life Effects, Peabody was convinced that David Hess was an actual maniac.
As for Hess, he was a musician who also wrote most of the music for this movie with Stephen Chapin. Yes, the man who is Krug — named for a bully of Craven’s, just like Freddy Krueger — wrote music, including “All Shook Up” for Elvis, “Your Hand, Your Heart, Your Love” for Andy Williams and “Speedy Gonzales” for Pat Boone. And then you see him in this, and he’s an absolute lunatic.
Mari Collingwood (Sandra Peabody, who went from movies like this and Massage Parlor Murders! to producing children’s television) and Phyllis Stone (Lucy Grantham) go to a concert and try to score; Junior (Marc Sheffler) brings them back to meet his father Krug (Hess), Sadie (Jeramie Rain, who claimed that she was once picked up by Manson and Tex Watson) and Fred “Weasel” Podowski (Lincoln). While Mari’s parents set up a surprise party, Krug and his family annihilate them, first forcing Phyliss to urinate all over herself (supposedly objectivel) and make love to one another before stabbing them, ending with Krug carving his name into Mari’s chest, raping her and shooting her as she staggers into a lake.
They make the biggest mistake ever by heading to Mari’s parents’ house, where the parents soon realize who they are. The suburban married couple can be just as vicious as Krug, as mom (Eleanor Shaw) bites off Weasel’s cock, Krug gets chainsawed, Junior kills himself, and Sadie is killed in the pool, just as the police arrive.
Newspaper ads screamed, “You will hate the people who perpetrate these outrages—and you should! But if a movie—and it is only a movie—can arouse you to such extreme emotion, then the film director has succeeded … The movie makes a plea for an end to all the senseless violence and inhuman cruelty that has become so much a part of the times in which we live.” It became a video nasty ten years after it was made; there were cuts made by the filmmakers that would have made things much worse, such as more of the forced lesbian sex, Sadie raping Mari, and Mari living long enough for her parents to find her.
Siskell said “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.” Ebert, on the other hand, said that it was “about four times as good as you’d expect.”
Watching it for the first time, I was struck by how brutal this film is from the first few moments, as even a kind mailman comments on Mari’s sexuality when we expect that he’s just a nice old man. Everything from then on is a trap; we know that Mari and Phyliss are trapped in a death march, endlessly repeating their demise as this is watched repeatedly. Other than Junior, Krug and his family see them as just something to do, something to throw away, something to destroy. There’s no pressure release like most slashers — well, the cops — but instead, a reminder that to everyone but the parents, these two girls are just as meaningless as they are to the killers.
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