Director Dennis Iliadis’ remake of Wes Craven’s 1972 classic satisfies the palate of thrill seekers, instilling in audience members a feeling of getting your money’s worth — and that doesn’t happen too often in Hollywood thrillers these days. If you just ate cheese fries and a large soda, you’ll struggle to keep your meal down at least for the first hour. If you’re squeamish, don’t try the hide behind your legs or hands. Iliadis’ controversial remake promises to be a crowd pleaser — and this is no marketing gimmick. Just try to ignore the cheesy dialogue and the bad actors.
The villain in “Last House on the Left” is television’s up-and-coming bad boy, Garret Dillahunt (“Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles”), once again reprises an “everyone loves to hate” character as Krug, a merciless, unrestrained and poker-faced jailbird. His brother Francis (Aaron Paul, “Mission: Impossible III”) and friend with benefits Sadie (Riki Lindhome, “Life is Short”) break Krug out of a cop car in a hit and run. With no reserves even from the get-go, Iliadis invites us to witness his maniacal vision, opening the movie with a scene that concludes with a bullet lodged in a very dead detective’s skull while a second detective is strangled to death in Krug’s grip.
The plot focuses on the Collingwood family during its annual summer vacation to the family’s summer home. The only child, Mari Collingwood (Sara Paxton, “Superhero Movie”), decides to visit her loser friend Paige (Martha MacIsaac, “Superbad”). Disobeying a rule of thumb their mothers should have taught them as children — don’t talk to strangers — Mari and Paige naively befriend a sketchy, hooded teen named Justin (Spencer Treat Clark, “Gladiator”) and meet him in a motel to score a stash of weed. Lo and behold, trouble begins when Mari and Paige’s high is inopportunely interrupted by Krug, Justin’s father.
“Last House on the Left” begins as a generic thriller with unfortunate and unreal circumstances that only make sense in a movie. Normally, bleeding for hours from a bullet lodged in the shoulder while floating in a lake would probably kill a teenage girl, or at least infect the wound, but with this being a movie, the technicalities seem to be trivial enough to be overlooked.
A (second-rate) child actor who has dabbled in the film industry? Check. Two girls smoking up with a complete stranger? Check.
Two girls smoking up with a complete stranger who happens to be a convict’s son? Check.
A teenage girl managing to swim to a buoy with a bullet in her back and then swimming to shore before crawling through a rugged forest so she could lie on the porch to warn Mommy and Daddy? Check.
You could see the few conventions adopted from the quintessential Hollywood horror genre. The movie is typically replete with D- to B-list actors and follows a trend that uses incompetent teens whose stupidity serves the movie’s benefit. After all, the director and writers could blame the teenage raging hormones for their attraction to exploration and inevitable danger.
Still, the pros in the workmanship of this movie outweigh the cons.
Iliadis’ vision is meticulously fashioned to bring the audiences’ tension to a boil while being careful to avoid slipping the audience a single notch of empathy for the antagonists. Graphic and explicit scenes harness the sadistic capability of brutality. The camera shots of Mari’s face and bare buttocks capture the anxiety and pain of rape to a point of inducing angst and utter disgust from the audience. A defenseless Paige, coupled with her slow, writhing death from several stab wounds, keeps us cringing.
Iliadis makes sure that after an hour of rape and murder, the tension is released by a plethora of raw emotional ecstasy, tapping into the uncomfortable territory of nervous satisfaction the audience gains from Emma Collingwood (Monica Potter, “Saw”) and John Collingwood (Tony Goldwyn, “American Gun”) seeking retribution from those who hurt their daughter, Mari. Note the strangers they housed in their guesthouse happen to be the same lowlifes who raped and shot their daughter.
An adrenaline-induced high, fueled by what our unconscious craves for in a horror film — revenge on the villains — kicks in. Bottles broken over the head, fingers ground in the sink grater and Krug’s microwaved head embody the fight to exact revenge for a loved one. “Last House on the Left” serves to entertain while serving our innate pleasure in rooting for the good guys. But putting the entertainment factor aside, if you were in a similar situation, what wouldn’t you do for your family or friends?
31/2 stars out of 5.
