Review of The Last House on the Left

Wes Craven's first foray into the horror genre has been both praised and vilified with equal vehemence throughout the years. While it's way too crude and imperfect to qualify as a true masterpiece, it nonetheless has enough merits to ensure that it isn't a complete wash-out. Instead, this movie wavers betwixt and between being vile, crass, and revolting exploitation trash on one hand and having a relevant and provocative point to make about the intrinsic ugliness and barbarity of violence and how said violence scars, corrupts, and/or destroys all of those who either perpetuate it or are exposed to same. Craven deserves praise for his obdurate refusal to either sanitize or glamorize the unflinchingly graphic and sadistic violence shown herein; the protracted sequence with the two teenage girls being raped, tortured, humiliated, and murdered by the vicious criminal gang in the woods is every bit as horrible, unpleasant, and upsetting as it ought to be, with the single most devastating scene occurring when the gang suddenly realizes the ghastly enormity of what they've done after they kill the two girls. The acting is a decidedly mixed bag: David Hess as savage and sneering gang leader Krug Stillo, Fred Lincoln as the equally ferocious and depraved Fred "Weasel" Podowski, and Jeramie Rain as coarse and abrasive bisexual moll Sadie are all frightfully believable in their absolute baseness and wickedness, Marc Sheffler is genuinely pitiable as Krug's meek and browbeaten heroin addict illegitimate son Junior, Lucy Grantham as the sweet and naive Mari Collingwood and Sandra Cassell as Mari's sassy and more worldly friend Phyllis Stone are likewise credible and appealing, but Richard Towers and Cynthia Carr as Mari's straight-arrow parents both give terribly stiff and unpersuasive performances. Moreover, the clumsy moments of ill-judged humor are embarrassing and woefully out of place; the scene with the two bumbling cops (one of whom is played by future "Karate Kid" movie series regular Martin Kove!) and a toothless old black hag is downright painful to watch. Hess' alternately wonky and melodic score for the most part works; the folks songs in particular are lovely and poignant, but the happy and jaunty bluegrass music that plays during the abduction sequence comes across like a heavy-handed attempt at ironic counterpoint. Victor Hurwitz's rough and plain cinematography greatly adds to the overall gritty documentary-style cinema veritate realism. A severely flawed, but still pretty good and ultimately quite powerful and unsettling picture.