About the movie
The Last House on the Left
Rating: 
Cast:
Joshua Cox; Tony Goldwyn; Garret Dillahunt; Riki Lindhome; Martha MacIsaac; Spencer Treat Clark; Aaron Paul; Sara Paxton; Monica Potter
Directed by:
Dennis Iliadis
On the web:
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READER FEEDBACK
‘Last House’ is a real horror
In researching Wes Craven's "original" version of "Last House on the Left," we learn that it wasn't original at all.
Craven was remaking (I kid you not) an award-winning Ingmar Bergman movie ("Virgin Spring") about a medieval town set upon by violent strangers.
Craven updated it for the 1970s, drawing upon the nation's fixation with the murderous Charles Manson gang - his main villain was a hairy, crazy-eyed marauder.
Ditto this remake, featuring Garret Dillahunt as the killer with the hairy chin, psycho stare and weirdo posse. He's a brawny, seething redneck, preying on a family of privileged urbanites (Tony Goldwyn, Monica Potter) in their rural retreat.
His malevolence, though, is upstaged by the movie's own sadism - it's a typical neo-horror thriller that replaces suspense with grotesque clinical violence.
If someone is stabbed, it's not enough that you see the blade, hear the sound, watch the blood spread.
There's a lingering shot of the knife penetrating flesh, and director Dennis Iliadis leaves the camera there for a full minute, so we have time to absorb the full sickness of the moment.
A subsequent, graphic rape is allowed to run on for several minutes, during which the victim's face is repeatedly pushed into the mud, a close-up that Iliadis returns to again and again.
Does he mean us to be horrified? Titillated?
I'd like to think that a movie studio would not give millions of dollars to a pervert who'd turn such a moment into pornography, but I don't know - there are earlier scenes of the poor girl dressing and undressing, as if Iliadis is whetting an appetite.
It may be his own.
today's 
