Today, in honor of our recent horror theme and the fact that October 31st is literally days away, I watched a classic horror movie from 1976 and its modern remake. Last House On The Left is one in a long line of classic horror flicks from the 70’s, 80’s and even as recent as the 90’s that have been remade into mere shadows of their former selves. Allow me to elaborate…
The basic story here is the same in both versions. Girl goes out for the night to "hang out" with a friend. The girl’s parents are not big fans of said friend but allow the night out anyway. Girl promises her parents to be "good" and so on and so forth. Once away from the watchful eye of mommy and daddy however, alcohol becomes involved and the two friends make a deal to score some marijuana from a random guy they meet in town. The "score" turns out to be a false front laid in place by a band of criminals that have been providing much fodder for the local news. The girls fall victim to kidnapping, brutal torture and several forms of sexual molestation. When all is said and done and the evil doers have dumped the girls off and left them for dead. Afterward they decide to find some R&R at a local but out of the way home by posing as stranded motorists. Little do they know that the couple that takes them in and offers them food and shelter are none other than the parents of one of the girls they just left for dead. Drama unfolds and the rest is for you to watch.
As usual, I was more impressed by the original than the new model. The new film should have used advanced technology to make the abuse scenes seem more stomach turning. The original contained more grotesque material in my opinion. Also, the criminals were much sicker in the original than in the new. The way in which they carried themselves and some of the subject matter of their conversations screamed psychotic beyond repair. The "father" criminal in the 1976 version intentionally hooked his own son on heroine as a means to control him. How sick is that?
The new version of Last House On The Left was too pretty for me. Everybody in it may as well have been a model. To make a vicious villain of this type seem real and believable for me personally, you need to make him seem like the scum of the earth. The 1976 version accomplished this quite well. The baddies were just that, bad. The look and the feel and everything about them just let me know that they were up to no good. The new version was filled with the dark and mysterious "sexy" bad guy who rocked the 5 o clock shadow and spoke in a deep, sensual voice. It felt like I was watching a soap opera villain or one out of the pages of a harlequin novel most of the time.
Minds have changed since 1976 and current film viewers seem to have much more of a penchant for the disturbing side of life. With films like Hostel and the Saw series it seems America just can’t get enough of blood, gore, violence, and sexual deviance. The new version of Last House On The Left knows this and decides to run with it. There is a rape scene in that film that honest to goodness seemed so real that it was honest to goodness extremely hard for me to watch. There were moments when I had to look away. The scene just never ended and it was, in my opinion, too graphic. I can get the point without it being drilled into my brain.
Both films have their strong suits and negatives. The older version contains some scenes of comedy that the newer leaves out and the newer is much more clean cut in the way that it’s filmed. I would suggest both if you have the time, but check out the original if you’re in the mood for a classic that will creep you out and definitely does not bore.
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