“To avoid fainting, keep repeating:
It’s only a movie…
Only a movie…
Only a movie…
Only a movie…”
-from the trailer to the movie

Exploitation movies, or “video nasties” as they are called in some countries, have a power that most movies do not have (certainly not in today’s film market). They shock even the most jaded and seasoned of movie fanatics, and they burn into your subconscious in a way that cannot be undone. I have read a lot on Wes Craven’s “Last House On Left” and of the impact it had when it was first came out. I never bothered watching it for the longest time, but I guess it was inevitable that I would watch it years later. Like Gaspar Noe’s “Irreversible,” it’s a movie that I was bound to see at some point. Many would prefer to stay far away from movies like this, but I don’t want to be like everyone else. I don’t want to be put off from watching a movie just because it shocks more than half of the world. Who am I to talk or criticize a particular movie if I have not seen it for myself?

“The Last House On The Left” is Wes Craven’s debut as a director, and he made it with future “Friday The 13th” director Sean S. Cunningham on an extremely low budget. While many of Craven’s later movies deal with horror on a fantasy level like “A Nightmare On Elm Street” among other films of his, the horror of “Last House On The Left” is all too real. It deals with real people and real situations that could happen to anyone of us. It was made back in 1972, and it still has the power to completely unnerve anyone who witnesses it. Even though I knew that I has a pretty good idea of what was going to happen, it is still shocked me more than I thought it would. And like many horror movies of the past, it is going to be remade and released in theaters in 2009 dammit.

To dismiss “The Last House On The Left” as pure exploitation is much too easy. There is violence, naked bodies, and a lot of blood and gore, but there is more going on here than that. What most people fail to see in many of Wes Craven’s movies are the thoughts behind the stories and characters. Throughout his long career, he has made movies that work on an intellectual level as well as a visceral one, and this one is no exception. Wes has said that he made this movie in response to the Vietnam War which was going on at the time. I can certainly see that, but I think it also deals with the death of the 1960’s as well as the total loss and destruction of innocence.

Around this time, the Manson family had committed those heinous murders in Hollywood, and whose victims included Sharon Tate, then Roman Polanski’s wife. The film deals with humanity at its most depraved and animalistic, and how no one can ever go back to who they once were. Everything is changed when the movie is over, and so are we having watched it.

Those familiar with the movie knows that the basic story is somewhat inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s film “Virgin Spring,” and it follows two teenage girls, Mari and Phyllis, as they head into the city to go to a concert. While in town, they decide to score some grass and go to a total stranger (most people would know better) who ends up leading him back to his place. It turns out that at his place are a couple of escaped convicts and their girlfriend who then proceed to torture the two girls to their last dying breath. You can see why the tagline of the movie fit this movie brilliantly. You have to keep reminding yourself that is only a movie, but that becomes challenging because what happens is all too real.

As this twisted family of psychos proceeds to rape and torture the two girls in the woods right near one of them lives, it is intercut with scenes of one of the girl’s parents preparing a birthday party for her and baking her cake. There is an innocence with the scenes with the parents that makes the scenes of sheer brutality all the more uncomfortably raw to sit through. You don’t watch a movie like “The Last House On The Left” as much as you experience it. It’s not a jump out of your seat horror film, although there are a few moments that qualify. Movies don’t get more bleak or brutal than this one does.

Once the group has finished their dirty work, their car breaks down and they end up staying as guests of the husband and wife of one of the girls they just murdered. The two of them just welcome these people in, not knowing who they are mind you, so that they don’t have to walk all the way into town. They even take the time to make dinner for these psychotic bastards and give them wine to drink. You would never ever see that happening today, ever. I guess it was the custom of people in the 60’s to be hospitable to total strangers. You know how that famous song from that decade goes:

“C’mon people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try and love one another right now.”

“My parents are always telling me how cool the 60’s were. Well, look at where the 60’s got them!”
-Christian Slater in “Pump Up The Volume”

During the course of that evening, the wife discovers a necklace and of their guest’s necks, and it is the same one she and her husband gave their daughter Mari before she went off with her friend Phyllis. This soon leads her to her discovering bloody clothes in one of their suitcases, and soon she and her husband are rushing off to the lake where they find their daughter dead. From thereon out, they both plot their bloody revenge against their guests, and the movie then heads straight into its viciously ultra violent conclusion.

To watch a movie like “The Last House On The Left” is to witness how thoughtlessly brutal human nature can be. You have to wonder what could make something do something so utterly evil like forever rob a young girl of her virtue and innocence. What brings someone to sink so low into the realm of all that is evil? The more I think about this movie after having watched it, I can see how Craven was illustrating his emotional response to the war in Vietnam. We had basically gone into that country and raped it without too much thought of what would happen to us, and that conflict bled deeply into our country and on our own soil. This has been covered in many movies dealing with Vietnam and other wars we fought. Brian DePalma dealt with the destruction of a country from afar by illustrating it through the rape of a foreigner in movies like “Casualties Of War” and last year’s “Redacted.”

You have to give the actors a lot of credit here. They don’t so much act their parts as much as they inhabit to the point where they must have been completely traumatized by their experience just making this movie. Medals of valor should be given out to both Sandra Cassell who plays Mari, and Lucy Grantham who plays Phyllis as they are forced to suffer indignities than none of us would wish on another human being. They are beaten, humiliated, stripped naked and violated in the worst ways imaginable. What happens to Mari is the toughest part of the movie to endure. We see her all innocent and sexy at the start of the movie, and when she is violated by one of the psychotic bastards, we feel violated as well. When she walks into the river as if in a trance, we see the death and destruction of innocence personified through her.

But it’s not just the girls who die, the killers (at the moment they shoot Mari dead) also die inside. There is a perverse ecstasy they take in degrading their hostages, but killing them off leaves them with nothing inside. All feeling dies within these people, and they never come back to who they were. They don’t really deserve to anyway. In retrospect, that stood out as one of the most interesting moments of “The Last House On The Left,” seeing these reaction this group has after they have killed off the two girls. The blank looks on their faces is a haunting image, and one you won’t be able to get out of your head.

I have to tell you, David Hess gives one of the most evil mofos the movie world has ever seen with his performance as Krug Stillo. There is no single redeeming feature to this man, and he sinks even deeper into a moral black hole when you realize he controls his son by hooking him on heroin. Hess also did the music score for this movie, and to put it mildly, it is utterly bizarre. It would seem almost totally out of place in a movie like this if it did not help illustrate the feeling the 60’s had for people before it is laid waste by the movie’s brutal conclusion.

One other important thing to note about “The Last House On The Left” is that this is not your cheer on the good guys as they get back at the bad guys movie. When the parents get their revenge, there is no joy to be taken in it. The violence in the movie feels so real that at the end, you are as emotionally drained as this married couple is. Many people complain about the unspeakable violence in this movie, but then they go out to see the big action movie playing at theaters like “Rambo” which featured dozens of exploding limbs and other body parts. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, heck I like those movies as well. But it is hypocritical to get furious at one violent movie while excusing another equally violent movie. The only real difference is the level of realism, and “The Last House On The Left” has it in spades. You can tell “Rambo” is a movie, but you have to remind yourself that this one is.

It’s amazing that Wes Craven and Sean Cunningham managed to make such an infamous with such a bare bones budget. You can bitch and moan about the production values of this movie, but c’mon! These guys weren’t being bankrolled by a major studio, and there’s no way they could have been with this movie. Granted, there are problems with the movie. There is a subplot dealing with a two stupid cops trying to get the scene of the crime, and it is completely unnecessary as if some comic relief could make this movie anymore bearable.

I should also add that one of those cops is played by Martin Kove, and he later went on to play the evil Sensai Kreese in “The Karate Kid” movies. He seems to have been the only actor to come out of this with a long lasting acting career. Kove must have been happy that he didn’t have to play one of the bad guys in this film.

With all the unpleasantness surrounding “The Last House On The Left,” why would I give it a positive review? Because it stands out from the average exploitation fare of the time, and it is a very strong example of its genre. There is a good deal of thought that was put into the movie, and to an extent it represents some of the deep seated emotions that were everywhere when the movie was first released. No, it is not an enjoyable movie, but not all movies are meant to be enjoyed. Besides, it’s a horror movie, and horror movies are supposed to be disturbing. It did its job for me, and it is one heck of a thriller that stands on top of a mountain of crap that it could have easily drowned in.

It is also a daring movie for those brave enough to experience it. It doesn’t hold anything back, and it deals with the real world and not some made up fantasy world so far removed from our own. Craven gets to the heart of the matter and never backs away from the ugliness of it. No wonder this remains a big favorite of horror fans after so many years.

It says a lot about a movie that it can still retain its power to shock and unnerve its audience 30 years after its release. “The Last House On The Left” belongs in the same company as the original “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” for remaining a sucker punch of movie for so damn long. It is an uncompromising film that you would never see made today, and no remake will ever match the raw power this movie has.

You have been warned. You don’t like unpleasant movies? Stay miles away from this one! Just remember, it’s only a movie… Only a movie… Only a movie… Only a movie… With an utterly bizarre music score!

***1/2 out of ****

par·al·lax

–noun

1. The apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position of the observer.

2. Astronomy. The apparent angular displacement of a celestial body due to its being observed from the surface instead of from the center of the earth (diurnal parallax or geocentric parallax) or due to its being observed from the earth instead of from the sun (annual parallax or heliocentric parallax). Compare parallactic ellipse.

3. The difference between the view of an object as seen through the picture-taking lens of a camera and the view as seen through a separate viewfinder.

4. An apparent change in the position of cross hairs as viewed through a telescope, when the focusing is imperfect.

American Psychological Association (APA):
parallax. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Retrieved March 04, 2008, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/parallax


I always wondered what that word meant, let alone in relation to this movie. This would have come in handy during those damn SAT’s I took so many years ago. It would have brought my scores up a bit. As for what my scores were…Well, you can just figure that out on your own.

“The Parallax View” is a thriller from 1974 that was directed by Alan J. Pakula and stars Warren Beatty. I saw it as a double feature with another Pakula thriller, “Klute.” I even remember my mom asking me to record this on the family VCR back in the 1980’s. I did succeed in getting the whole movie on tape as opposed to all those car races my dad and my brother asked me to record for them from time to time. We do have Tivo now, so I don’t have to do any of that anymore. Anyway, it’s a good thing I didn’t see this movie right away when I recorded it for my mom. They probably edited it down and cut all the good parts out.

The movie starts with an assassination of an assassination of a US Senator on the Space Needle in Seattle, Washington. The movie then jumps ahead 3 years later to see the far reaching circumstances this assassination has on those closely involved in it. Warren Beatty plays Joseph Frady, a reporter eager to get at the truth surrounding the assassination, and to find out why so many that were in the vicinity of the assassination have been dying. Many have been reported as dying from an embolism of some kind, but there are too many coincidences between all those dead that makes it impossible to believe that they simply just died. Beatty’s character may not be able to prove it, but they were murdered. But by whom?

The movie opens with Frady getting a visit from a female friend who is convinced that she is going to be murdered. She comes up with newspaper clippings of others present at the senator’s murder and how they died. But Frady dismisses her concerns as mere superstition, and that she cannot possibly be in danger. A couple of minutes later, we see her in the morgue, dead from an apparent overdose. This gets Frady up and running into finding out the truth as to why these people are being killed off. This drives his boss Bill Rintels (Hume Cronyn) to a lot of anxiety and irritation as he cannot get himself to believe all that is going on. Meanwhile, Frady risks life and limb literally to get at the truth behind everything. But like everything else, that truth will have a big cost.

Turns out that all roads lead to The Parallax Corporation, a business that hires highly anti-social people and trains them to be assassins, and their targets usually tend to be politicians and government figures that stand in the way of making policy or a good profit. The movie escalates the tension to a high level as Beatty’s character puts himself in the most dangerous of positions. One of the most tension filled moments in the movie comes when he finds that one of the Parallax assassins have put a bomb on board a plane with yet another politician, and Beatty boards the plane in an effort to find a way to get everyone off the plane before the bomb detonates.

What I have come to discover about the late Alan J. Pakula is that as a director, he managed to bring a lot of intelligence and reality to the movies he made, and there was never anything overly exaggerated in the scenes or in his direction. This seemed to ground the majority of his thrillers in a world so real that in the end, they come across as highly subversive. There is no hyper kinetic editing here, and the movie is not bursting over with an overpowering score or adrenaline inducing sound effects in any of Pakula’s movies. There is only the state of the world, and of what’s really happening around us instead of what we are led to believe.

This movie is now 30 years old, and yet its themes are not out of place in today’s society. The scenario of one man against the system, or of a person getting at the truth of the matter regardless of the consequences has been done over and over again. Last year, we had “Michael Clayton” which starred George Clooney as a fixer at a law firm who suddenly develops a crisis of conscience that forces him to go against all the corruption that has engulfed the later part of his life. It’s thrillers like “The Parallax View” that gave movies like “Michael Clayton” a reason for being.

Warren Beatty, who really hasn’t made a good movie in a long time, is perfectly cast here as this downtrodden reporter who is eager to not be as selfish as he has been most of his life. The movie does not ride on his good looks to sell itself, but on the intelligence of Beatty’s performance as well of those around him. If you can’t believe Beatty in this role, then the movie is not going to work. I’m not sure of how many people today can recognize what a great actor Warren Beatty can be if you give him the right material.

These days, we know that our government and the corporations are up to something that goes completely against what we were originally taught to believe in. What’s scary is that when “The Parallax View” was first released, nothing was all that different. It just keeps going on and on, and it’s almost like we are in denial about it. The question is, can we get at the truth of the matter and prove it to everyone who bothers to listen? Furthermore, can we do it in a way that doesn’t suck us into a trap that makes us look like a bad person to the rest of the world? This movie seems to say that this is not really possible, but it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try, and that we can’t simply give up.

“The Parallax View” is an excellent thriller that is definitely worth a watch. Coming out of one of the truly golden ages of cinema, the 1970’s, it is an underrated work that didn’t get the same audience of Pakula’s other movies like “All The President’s Men.” If you like Pakula’s work as a director, you should check this out.

Just remember, the truth is out there…

***1/2 out of ****