Last House on the Left

Even before THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE came this grisly little item, Wes Craven's THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, which is an uncomfortable, stupid, and just plain sick adaptation of THE VIRGIN SPRING.

Two young girls head into the city for a rock concert, and then afterwards, while looking for pot, are abducted, raped, tortured and murdered by a group of escaped criminals and their "animal-like" moll. They are coincidentally killed just outside one girl's house (which is very creepy), and the psychotics spend the night at her house only to be killed by her knowing parents.

The film never actually admits to ripping off THE VIRGIN SPRING, either. (Face it, how many people who watch this movie are going to know who Bergman is, anyway?) It opens by saying it is based on a true story, but if it is I would hate to see the dumb, moronic cops featured here. These two geniuses make the POLICE ACADEMY squad look like "NYPD Blue".

Unlike the Bergman film, the criminals don't enter the girl's house knowingly, so that alone adds to it's twisted sense of fate. This version also has a punk who, like Bergman's young herdsman, sees the murders as horribly as we do. Of course, you can't fully see that when his line is, "Hey! Stop it! Don't hurt them! Just have them make out with each other."

Although harrowing, many aspects of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT come off as a joke. The soundtrack, for one, plays happy, totally-'70s songs through every scene, the aforementioned stupid stupid cops, and also the way the young punk is finally killed. His criminal father, who "got him hooked on heroin to control him", orders him cult-style to kill himself when he retaliates. Dumb dumb dumb dumb. (And that ain't the theme to "Dragnet".) Extreme violence, sexual violence, coarse language, nudity.