Table Of Content
From there, The Last House on the Left gazes blankly as the two young women are bound and gagged, driven out to the woods and subjected to abhorrent acts of violence and sexual abuse. Their struggle for survival is made all the more unnerving by the fact that the woods are right outside Mari’s home and the Keystone Cops her parents have summoned to search for her can do nothing about it. This sets the stage for the “revenge” part of the rape-revenge scenario, when the gang, having bloodily dispatched the two women, hole up at a nearby home they’re late to realize is Mari’s. What follows is another messy fight to the death, this time between the grieving parents and their vile guests.
Videos1
Her plan is bizarre enough on its own, but couldn’t she have just attacked him when she first got in position? Instead, she chose to engage intimately with him before seeking her revenge? There’s almost no way to view these final scenes as anything but a form of gruesome black comedy. Once you get past that initial revulsion – what kind of sicko would even want to see a movie like this?
Shudder Releases Trailer for Urban Legend Horror Elevator Game
Once filming began, the weight of the script’s contents began to dawn on the cast and crew. The hardcore sex in the script was eliminated because of concerns from cast members, but the violence stayed. Craven states on the commentary track for the home video release that the chaotic style of filming used in The Last House on the Left was meant to emulate the violent news footage coming out of the Vietnam War. People were being confronted with horrific images of war, and Craven thought most horror and action movies failed to confront violence in a way that came anywhere close to what was being shown on the nightly news. By exposing viewers to realistic violence in prolonged sequences, Craven ushered in a new standard of violence for horror and exploitation movies.
Directed By
The Last House on the Left is a 1972 horror-exploitation film written and directed by Wes Craven. The story was inspired by the 13th century Swedish ballad "Töres döttrar i Wäng". The film has gained acclaim as one of the most controversial movies ever made. The controversial nature of some of the sexual scenes caused the original film reels to be burned. Out of the original 91 minute cut, only 84 minutes still remain intact, though some of the audio has been destroyed. The movie had a budget of $90,000 (about half a million today, adjusted for inflation).
The Last House on the Left Almost Ruined Wes Craven - CBR
The Last House on the Left Almost Ruined Wes Craven.
Posted: Fri, 07 May 2021 07:00:00 GMT [source]
The next morning, Mari and Phyllis are bound, gagged, and put in the trunk of Krug's car and transported to the woods. Phyllis is forced to urinate in her jeans, and Mari and Phyllis are forced to perform sexual acts on each other. Phyllis distracts the kidnappers to give Mari an opportunity to escape but is chased by Sadie and Weasel, while Junior stays behind to guard Mari. Mari tries gaining Junior's trust by giving him her necklace and calling him "Willow".
The Last House On The Left Was Almost Ruined By One Plot Point - Screen Rant
The Last House On The Left Was Almost Ruined By One Plot Point.
Posted: Sat, 30 Jan 2021 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Chris has a degree in film studies at Temple University’s campus in Tokyo, Japan. That’s not to say that The Last House on the Left was made without intention. Craven was fully aware of the social climate in the United States in the early 1970s, and his script reflects his awareness. The women’s liberation movement was gaining momentum by 1970, and the characters of Sadie (Jeramie Rain) and Mari Collingwood (Sandra Peabody) each embody different sides of second-wave feminism in their dialogue.
Cast & Crew
It took that long for the film to not be understood as a mere obscenity, without redeeming value. Many different versions of the film exist on various DVD and VHS releases struck from different cuts of the film, many of them from different countries. To get a completely uncut version is difficult as even some cinema machinists cut footage from prints of the movie before screening it during the 1970s; many copies were cut or "hacked to pieces" and because of this, some scenes have become rarities. I just had this fascination of watching vintage movies and overall love for horror movies.
Releases by Country
Coinciding with this, anti-rape movements led to the first rape crisis centers opening in the United States in 1972. It’s up for debate what exactly Craven is trying to say about feminism and rape culture in The Last House on the Left, but what is clear is that he was trying to get a reaction from the audience by focusing on emotionally-charged subjects. Justin Mazaleski is a writer who specializes in bizarre screenplays and personal reflections on art.
The Last House on the Left at 50: Wes Craven’s shock horror retains its power
Many years later, I had an intelligent discussion about the film with my brother-in-law and it opened my eyes as to what I saw in the movie that others missed, and that’s what I’m going to expand upon in this article. Written and directed by one of horror’s most masterful filmmakers, Wes Craven, the film is exploitation cinema at its most raw and unforgiving. Should a director’s intent have any bearing on how a viewer experiences a film? There are some people who believe that Tommy Wiseau’s The Room is a bizarre, hilarious work of art.
We cut from the girls being forced to undress at knifepoint to Mari’s parents baking a cake while a goofy, jaunty tune plays in the background. There was even a warning on the front cover that the film was banned in the U.K.! This has to be an amazing movie if a whole country actually banned it, right? Every weekend when my mom would take me to the video store (renting movies was solely a weekend activity back in those days), I would stand there and read the back of the case until I had memorized it. But every week, the answer was always “No, Justin, pick something else.” Last House on the Left became a legend in my mind, and my inability to actually watch the movie only increased its stature in my adolescent brain.
1972 (1972) and Night of the Lepus (1972) were too far removed from reality to truly unnerve audiences. The splatter movies pioneered by Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast (1963) were around, but those movies often had more camp than terror. Italy was making strides with their giallo films like The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), but the violence was often stylized in ways that made them seem not quite real. The Last House on the Left was crude, ugly, and unflinching in its portrayal of violence. In the early 1970s, Sean S. Cunningham (best known as the producer/director of Friday the 13th, 1980) met Wes Craven on the set of a softcore pseudo-documentary about sex titled Together (1971). Craven worked as an editor on the film, and he also helped Cunningham direct.
While the film initially received a polarizing reception from critics, it was highly profitable, grossing over $3 million at the domestic box office. Craven has said that The Last House on the Left was inspired, in part, by the explicit footage that was piped into news segments on Vietnam war, but wasn’t reflected by the horror and action films being produced at the time. The country was willing to send its young people off to war, but it couldn’t confront the same violence and death in a theater. It’s hard to define the film’s political point of view, other than a prevailing feeling that wars were being fought at home, too, and that the idealism of the love generation had curdled into bad vibes. It may not be a film about America or Vietnam per se, but it’s an essential mood ring of the early 70s. Most of these copycats were cheap (though maybe fun) imitations of Wes Craven’s film.
Then later, when Mari’s parents enact their revenge on their daughter’s murderers, viewers see that even seemingly “normal” citizens can quickly resort to barbarism and grotesque sexual violence. This blurring of lines, as much or more than anything else, is what enraged so many people. The Last House on the Left was released at a time when horror and exploitation movies were primed for an explosive change. Most films of the time weren’t even attempting to create the kind of grueling horror seen in The Last House on the Left.
Together was a success, so the movie’s distributor offered Cunningham and Craven money to make a horror movie. Cunningham didn’t want to direct, so Craven was given his first opportunity to write and direct his own film. Going back to the discussion I had with my brother-in-law, I tried to explain the virtues of this movie and how I viewed it as a unique piece of art. His rebuttal was that the way I interpreted the film was not what Wes Craven intended. He said that unlike David Lynch’s love of stiff acting to emphasize banality and give scenes a dreamlike quality, the acting in Last House was just the result of incompetent actors and should be seen as such. Along the same lines, he said that while I may view the attempts at comedy as being surreal, they were, in fact, just poorly conceived ideas that didn’t belong in the film.
Regardless of the validity of these anecdotes, The Last House on the Left did meet with strong resistance. In addition to protests and calls from the public for theaters to stop showing the movie, some theaters took it upon themselves to cut scenes out of their prints before screening. The controversy led to a buzz about the movie that helped drive people to go see it, so many theaters continued to show it (with varying degrees of edits). The Last House on the Left ended up making millions at the box office. The actors playing the vicious felons (David Hess, Fred Lincoln, Jeramie Rain, and Marc Sheffler) are as naturalistic as they come. They give amazing performances, especially considering their limited acting experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment