If we have learned anything from watching horror films – and the proliferation of remakes they inevitably set into motion – it is that we are gratified by avenging commoners seeking swift, bloody justice. Whether it is Wes Craven’s original The Last House on the Left or the coarse exploitation films of I Spit On Your Grave, themes of revenge and retribution is what we as an audience respond to. All that’s left for us to decide is whether or not we’re on board with the film up until the final reversal. For the latest remake, which comes one month after the abysmal remake of Friday the 13th, director Dennis Iliadis and screenwriters Adam Alleca and Carl Ellsworth so muddle the first half of the film with clichés, inane characterizations and general debauchery, that I found it nearly impossible to appreciate or respond with anything more than a yawn at the what transpires during the long, bloody second half.
The film begins with a typical family venturing out to their isolated lake house for a vacation. Underneath, there is the familiar and superfluous subplot about a family trying to bond after the loss of a child. On their first day, Mari (Sara Paxton) and her friend Paige (Martha MacIsaac) are kidnapped by a ruthless band of escaped convicts – a Manson family-style clique held together by hillbilly patriarch, Krug (Garret Dillahunt). The girls are brutally beaten, raped and left for dead. Seeking refuge from an approaching storm, the convicts are welcomed for the night by the Collinwoods (Monica Potter and Tony Goldwyn), Sara’s unsuspecting parents. Luckily for Sara, she only appears dead and she manages to stumble home to her parents just as the realization dawns on them that they are housing their daughter’s attackers. What happens next is an extended and thoroughly unsatisfying cat-and-mouse thriller in which the Collinwoods attempt to catch and kill their daughter’s attackers through the course of one night. This, of course, while their daughter lies bleeding and nearly comatose.
The problem with a film like this is that it wastes so much time during the first act focusing on the motivations and the exploits of the convicts, we’re left wondering who we’re to care for. Obviously, we’re indebted to care about Sara and Paige, and to a certain extend, the parents, but we’re never allowed to get close to them. It appears that the only way Iliadis cares about how we get to know these characters is by giving them close-ups; staying so close to their faces and bodies, that we’re forced, to literally crawl through the screen and burrow inside their heads. This doesn’t work. All the characters are ciphers and exist only as plot contrivances. As a result, we’re left to fend for ourselves as the director’s smothering camerawork and framing devices render the proceedings tiresome, boring and suffocating. Whereas Craven’s original film was a dirty exploitation film that matched its brutal subject matter with its equally unruly aesthetic, the remake is too conventional to merit such debauchery, and simply not trashy enough to get away with it.
The only person to come away relatively unscathed is the engaging Tony Goldwyn, who manages to portray John Collinwood as a frightened man doing what has to be done. This realistically comes after he realizes that his daughter has been violated. He does seem like an everyman protecting the honour of his child. And ironically enough, he’s the only actor in the film who manages to get some mileage out of all those close-ups. Unfortunately, by the time he starts his rampage through the house, I’ve all but given up on caring whether he succeeds or not. Iliadis and his crew squander any sense of momentum and release by adding a coda to the end that is as laughable as it is stupid. Regrettably, that ending is representative of the whole of The Last House on the Left.
Richard Saad
© Cinephile Magazine, 2009