Not long afterward, Krug and his gang-knife-wielding Weasel (Fred Lincoln), infantile junkie Junior Stillo (Marc Sheffler), and the lone woman, Sadie (Jeramie Rain)-are driving along in the country in a convertible as Sadie fucks Krug in the backseat.

John and Estelle Collingwood (Richard Towers and Cynthia Carr), prepare for their daughter’s birthday party. These alternately despairing and flip tones don’t traditionally go together, and this isn’t the first such juxtaposition in the film, as Phyllis and Mari’s capture by the gang in the city is contrasted with a comic moment in which Mari’s parents, Dr. Interspersed with this depravity are scenes in which inept cops try to reach the woods, circling the kill zone while the score (composed by Hess) zips and slides along in a manner that recalls the music of later highway comedies like Smokey and the Bandit. The scenes in which a gang rapes and murders two teenage women are prolonged and disgusting, as the women are never merely elements in an aesthetic, but viscerally terrified, humiliated humans begging for mercy with unmooring rawness. There are more violent films than The Last House on the Left, especially in the post- Nightmare on Elm Street era of the serial killer as ironic rock star, though the violence here isn’t palatable or delivered with the ritualized seriousness that flatters our intelligence for consuming a nasty movie. Meanwhile, Craven’s film is a direct assault on notions of consistency and control, seeing them as the sort of distancing mechanisms that distract our country and sanitize atrocity. It’s consistency of tone in media-a smooth, euphemistic notion of polish known as production values-that renders anything from a carton of milk to a war marketable, and such consistency is also valued in art, which often tells us what we’re getting and telegraphs what we’re supposed to think. In his feature-film debut, writer-director Wes Craven oscillates between broadly comic and nihilistic tones and between moments of trashy amateurishness and piercing existential poetry, criticizing the very notion of tonality. The film is so unnerving for appearing, on the outset, to have been unintentionally achieved-a flakey, dangerous quality that many contemporary filmmakers unconvincingly attempt to emulate. Forty-six years after its release, The Last House on the Left remains a ferocious work of sadistic cinema.

The last house on the street review