The Last House on the Left (18)

Alison Rowat's Review

Wes Craven’s 1972 shocker, remade here, about a band of outlaws versus an upstanding all-American family, at least had the dubious honour of being ahead of its time in the gore stakes.

Dennis Iliadis’s efficient if pointless remake boosts the sadism and adds an extra layer of unpleasantness all its own. Sara Paxton plays one of two friends who ill-advisedly take up a stranger’s offer of drugs at his motel room.

When the teenager’s daddy returns, a helter skelter journey into horror begins. In addition to the routine nastiness there are the regulation shots of distressed women careering about in their underwear.

More depressing than the violence is the tedium waiting for justice, of sorts, to be dispensed.

Paul Greenwood's Review

For all its reputation as a video nasty, Wes Craven's 1972 version of The Last House on the Left, itself a remake of Bergman's The Virgin Spring, is no prize. But in its grungy, Vietnam-era way, it retains a certain power that this slick remake fails to match.

It tells much the same story as the original but somehow manages to add half an hour to the running time, as a family at their isolated vacation home fight back against the criminals who raped and tortured their daughter and her friend.

For the most part repellent and pointless, it becomes something of an ordeal which, as a revenge fantasy, doesn't come close to the primal ruthlessness of the remake of Craven's own The Hills Have Eyes. As a comment on audience voyeurism, it’s been rendered largely irrelevant by Michael Haneke’s Funny Games anyway.