The Last House on the Left (1972)
Directed by Wes Craven
On the eve of her 17th birthday, Mari and friend Phyllis set off from her family home to attend a rock concert in the city. Attempting to score some drugs on the way, the pair run afoul of a group of vicious crooks, headed up by the sadistic Krug.
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What critics compared The Last House on the Left to
Technical credits are uniformly high and the whole is driven by a wonderfully compelling score that combines Angelo Badalamenti's compositions with David Hess's music for "The Last House On The Left." Starring Jordan Ladd, Rider Strong, James DeBello, Cerina Vincent and Joey Kern.
Any vicarious thrill from seeing these films’ antagonists hunted down by avenging angels (typically, but not always, the victims of rape) in work as varied in style and quality as The Last House on the Left (1972), Ms .45…
The action might be set in the 1870s but its musings on race and guns are still depressingly relevant, and, for all its narrative twists, exploding heads and flickers of anachronistic music (The White Stripes’ ‘Apple Blossom’, David Hess’ plaintive ‘now You’re All Alone’ from The Last House On The Left ), it frequently offers an unusually sombre tone.
Another old horror hand, Wes Craven (who has been savaged like few other filmmakers for his brutal debut feature, The Last House on the Left), did the genre a bigger favor last year.
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The latter, at least, is explicable: the film was conceived by Craven and producer Sean S. Cunningham (who would, eight years later, drop another bomb on the horror landscape when he produced and directed Friday the 13th ) as an actual hardcore sexploitation film, deciding only at the very start of shooting that it would be better for their artistic aspirations (which were "indict a culture of violence and rape", not "get main in raincoats to whack off to a rape scene") if they dropped that angle.
He had dabbled in soft-core sleaze during the “porno chic” era (including 1971’s Together, which starred Marilyn Chambers), although he is most notorious for producing the Wes Craven-directed The Last House on the Left (1972), one of the most shocking and talked-about movies of the early ’70s drive-in circuit.
True, it has its sanguinary moments, but, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it gets its overall charge more from the constant threat of sadism than from anything we actually witness.
Still, in 1972 people were awfully bothered about the increased violence of movies as a result of the (then) more lenient R rating -- Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs, Dirty Harry, Polanski's scarifying Macbeth: one film after another was reflecting the nation's soul-sickness knee-deep in Vietnam.
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