Blu-Ray Review: ‘The Last House on the Left’ Deserves Better

Printer-friendly versionE-mail page to friendPDF version

CHICAGO – Dennis Iliadis’ brutal and accomplished remake of Wes Craven’s influential horror classic “The Last House on the Left,” now available on Blu-Ray and DVD, deserves a much better home release than the typically reliable Universal/Rogue has delivered for horror fans this week.

Blu-Ray Rating: 2.5/5.0

Despite decent reviews, “Last House” disappointed at the box office, but it will find a loyal audience on the home market and they’ll be angry at the scant special features that don’t even take advantage of Universal’s best recurring feature, U-Control and provide no insight into a complex and daring film. Far inferior horror films are regularly getting lavish two-disc Blu-Ray sets filled with special features. There’s nothing fair about HD.

Last House on the Left was released on Blu-Ray on August 18th, 2009.
Photo credit: Universal Home Video

The remake of “Last House on the Left,” itself a remake of “The Virgin Spring,” is a dark and disturbing film about how far a typically “good” person will go when the sanctity of their family is destroyed. “The Last House on the Left” works because it puts the emphasis on actual, gut-churning horror instead of the typical action cliches that the genre turned into in the ’80s when the slasher pic jettisoned honest dread in favor of the quality kill. Even modern horror like “Saw” is more interested in a typical trait of the mystery movie - a twist ending - than actual scares.

“The Last House on the Left” is truly horrifying. A large number of people who rent it will not get through it. The TV commercials make it look like just another cookie cutter slasher pic but “Last House” is about awful, irredeemable people doing vicious things to good people and then those “normal” people turning the tables and doing the same.

It’s essentially a three-act, three-set piece. The set-up is simple - If there were people in your house who had done something unspeakably horrible to your child would you ever let them leave? It’s a theme of storytelling as old as the spoken word - revenge. The success of the film comes down to the execution, no pun intended.

Last House on the Left was released on Blu-Ray on August 18th, 2009. Photo credit: Universal Home Video

Mari Collingwood (Sara Paxton) and her friend Paige (Martha MacIsaac) make the mistake of asking the wrong sweet kid for weed. They follow Justin (Spencer Treat Clark) back to his hotel room and cross paths with the rest of his family. Led by the terrifying Krug (Garret Dillahunt) and assisted by the wacky Sadie (Riki Lindhome) and vicious Francis (Aaron Paul), Justin’s family kidnaps the pair, rapes them, tortures them, and tries to kill them.

Here’s where renters might reach for the remote. None of the brutality of what Krug and his clan do to Paige and Mari is glossed over like your typical mainstream horror movie. It will turn your stomach and make your skin crawl. Shouldn’t it? Why are people more upset when things like rape and torture are believably portrayed as if softening such horrific things makes them better?

And the darkness of the behavior that sets up “Last House” is necessary to make the final act effective. If it was softened in any way, we may not understand why John (Tony Goldwyn) and Emma (Monica Potter) go to the extremes they do when Krug and his team happen upon the home of one of the girls they just tortured.

Iliadis understands the difference between shock and tension. He draws out the time in between the violent moments, allowing the dirty, awful tension to work its way under your skin. It’s not a perfect film - the score is awful, slo-mo is over-used in the climactic moments, there are a few fetishizing shots that disturbed me, and the final scene is just stupid - but it’s still better than a lot of 2009 horror. Fans of the genre shouldn’t miss it.

And they probably won’t. Horror fans are completists. They’ll see it and they’ll marvel at the shoddy Blu-Ray presentation, one that includes about fifteen minutes of special features and that includes the four extra minutes at work in the unrated version of the film. The only other special features are about eight minutes of deleted scenes and a pathetic “A Look Inside” featurette that runs under 180 seconds. No commentary, no interviews, no real behind-the-scenes footage, no discussion of the original film, no U-Control functionality - it’s one of Universal’s most pathetically conceived collections of special features of the year to date.

Luckily, the film itself looks great with a perfect 1080p 1.85:1 transfer and an effective English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track. Blu-Ray is still about the actual movie and special features are usually an afterthought. They clearly were in this case.

By BRIAN TALLERICO Content Director HollywoodChicago.com [email protected]