The Last House on the Left

I’m rating this in the context of Friday the 13th, My Bloody Valentine and suchlike, because we’re speaking about the same target audience. And compared to those movies, The Last House on the Left is finally a proper brutal horror flick in which there are no annoying, GPS-dependent adolescents running around, waiting to be mutilated by another supercool masked immortal murderer. You either feel sorry for the massacred victims or you WANT to see them lying on the ground in a pool of their own blood. The emotions work and the acting performances are more than sufficient. If the film went deeper (the ethical question of the right to kill the murderer of your child with your own hands), it could have of course been something different and more valuable. But we’ve got Michael Haneke for that, not Wes Craven. Moreover, the original film also didn’t go deep, merely remaining an exploitation shocker. (15/05/2009)

The creators did the best they could with the original Last House On The Left, i.e. they did away with the wannabe funny and grotesque subplot with the cops, eliminated a lot of holes in logic and got a bigger budget. The violence escalates to a point where you can still bear it without problem, but it’s also sufficiently strong to generate an emotional response. The result is a superb and brilliantly made soft-exploitation film that it’s better than the original in every way. The fans of The Mummy, Transformers and other similar fairytales can complain all they want about this being a boring and gratuitously brutal film, but that’s what you can expect from them. There hasn’t been better horror in Czech cinemas for a few months and the fact that I was alone in the theatre is very sad in its own way. 85% (25/05/2009)

Boring, empty, self-serving. The violence is neither shocking, aesthetic or rousing, just emptily exhibiting and annoyingly stupid. The characters have absolutely no freedom of choice, the creators always push them where they want them to go, and brutality is the only way to get out of an emergency. Another confirmation that Hollywood makes rabbit shit out of pearls. There is a hundred times more real violence, real dilemmas and real suffering in "non-horror" Bergman. This crap belongs in the center of the peloton of mainstream attempts to shock. Who? Maybe only children. (17/05/2009)

Thanks to the hopeless atmosphere, the constant nasty feeling of what has already happened is nothing compared to what is yet to happen, and thanks to the absolute unpredictability of the plot, I have no choice and I have to put The Last House on the Left almost on the level of Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. It's probably the first film that deserves such a comparison. I wasn't really comfortable with the spectacle, but it greatly entertained me. (22/02/2021)

If all remakes of B-movies were of this quality, horror enthusiasts would have an uninterrupted movie feast. The Last House on the Left may be just another in a long line and is as far from the horror hall of fame as Uwe Boll's "red" rated films, but it’s nevertheless one of the significantly better films the Americans have offered in their frenzied horror output of recent years. Those who can endure the lengthy first act and the introduction to the characters, which is ultimately completely unnecessary, can look forward to a fairly detailed study of human suffering, depravity and the desire for revenge, which will eventually sweep every viewer to the side of the heroes. Atmospherically it's rather tone dull and psychologically it's only marginally biting, but when it was over I was overcome with a very pleasant feeling of well done filmmaking and the way our heroes resolved it all. The one year younger I Spit on Your Grave goes more headlong into it and has a much greater effect, but this one also does the job. 70% (22/03/2013)

Wes Craven's concept was extended to two slow-moving hours, which did not benefit the film. The first half is boring and stupid, and the violence isn’t overdone. The rape in the woods won't really make you feel any less lethargic. From the middle onwards the story turns into a purebred exploitation film combined with a revenge film. It features one remarkable twist, as well as games with a garbage disposal and a microwave oven. Finally, horror fans will be satisfied. Another way of looking at it is that this mess deserving one star improved, over a few short minutes, into deserving at least an average score. (26/06/2011)