Review of The Last House on the Left (1972) by Michael V — 19 Jul 2011

I remember it being more shocking the first time I saw it, but granted, films seem different through younger eyes. When I was in High School, this felt like a completely different film. It's one of those weird films that I'd dare call I "flawed masterpiece".

Even masterpiece is used loosely because 1) it's usually only used within and realm of horror and 2) either you get it or you don't. That being said, I do feel it's flawed, yet effective. Their are character development issues that after that film had my reeling and wondering about true motives and actions.

I don't want to give too much away. Tone was odd too in this time. Tone change in a film is something I normally have no problem with, but the music that was used to accent the scenes just felt weird.

The extremely happy music was used for very unhappy scenes, and had it been a different piece of music it may have worked better, but the music used just made it felt... slap-sticky... if that's a word.

However, the songs that David Hess wrote for the movie are very, very good, especially "The Road Leads to Nowhere" and it's used so well in certain scenes, I just couldn't get into the happy tracks.

Finally, the cops were complete idiots. Horror has always had a tradition of naive law enforcement. In ways it helps progress the story, but these cops were an Abbott and Costello routine gone awry. It felt like Craven was in a "I dislike law enforcement" mindset at this point in his life and made the cops as dumb as he possibly could and kept cutting back to them just being dumb.

However, flaws aside, it is an effective film with some good performances at times, some nice cinematography and some really tense, disturbing, passionate scenes that have this gritting gripping quality to them that most big budget horror fare just can't match.

This was the start of Wes Craven's career, so that alone is worth a watch.