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The Last House on the Left (2009)

Director: Dennis Iliadis

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16 reviews

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From Time Out London

Born out of the anti-Vietnam protests and inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Virgin Spring’, Wes Craven’s 1972 horror was an anti-establishment shocker that became infamous for its scenes of rape and violence. Dennis Iliadis’s remake retains its ferocious power and provocative themes, and thanks to a focused script that unfolds in real time, it ratchets up the suspense and sucks us into a remorseless cycle of violence and revenge.

Innocent teenager Mari Collingwood (Sara Paxton) and her wayward friend Paige (Martha Maclsaac) are abducted and brutalised by escaped psychopath Krug (Garrett Dillahunt), his aptly named girlfriend Sadie, his brother Francis and his wimpy son Justin. The captured girls are less helpless here, but these stomach-knotting early scenes are made worse by a nagging feeling that if they had only cooperated, or taken their chances, things might not have spiralled out of control. Then, in an irony inherited from ‘The Virgin Spring’, the killers seek refuge in Mari’s parents’ idyllic lakeside summer home, where John Collingwood (Tony Goldwyn) and his wife Emma (Monica Potter) – alerted by tell-tale clues to their guests’ true identities – use cunning, makeshift weapons and improvised booby traps to exact their cruel revenge.

Craven’s sub-$100,000 exploitation movie fused the sleazy intensity of the grindhouse with the piercing intelligence of an art film. Iliadis’s sensibility is more commercial, but he introduces a telling undercurrent of class hatred and never loses sight of how Mari’s parents are ultimately reduced to the same level of primal, animalistic violence as that of psychotic Krug and his cronies.

Author: Nigel Floyd 2009-06-09 10:52:57

Time Out London Issue 2025, June 11 - 17, 2009

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Jamie said...

Posted on Jun 11 2009 22:08 "Born out of the anti-Vietnam protests...Craven’s sub-$100,000 exploitation movie fused the sleazy intensity of the grindhouse with the piercing intelligence of an art film." Good grief! Has Mr. Floyd actually watched Wes Craven's original or just read about it (probably in the press notes to this film)?!
His review of this cynical and meretricious remake leads me to seriously wonder if he has watched that too.
I have no objection to violent films and I love intelligent horror cinema no matter how graphic, but this is an emptily slick, crassly manipulative and morally infantile piece of work which has nothing whatsoever to say about violence, vengeance or the human capacity for barabarism. And by the way, neither this film nor Craven's original bear anything more than a perfunctory similarity to Bergman's Virgin Spring.

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