"The Last House on the Left" (quality rating: 6 out of 10)

Director: Dennis Iliadis

Screenwriter: Carl Ellsworth, re-make based on the 1972 hit

Wes Craven film

Starring: Tony Goldwyn, Monica Potter, Sara Paxton, Garret Dillahunt

Time: 1 hr., 50 min.

Rating: R (violence including a rape and disturbing images, vulgarity, nudity, some drug use)

Yeah, but what's the point?

"The Last House on the Left" is a recollection of horrormeister Wes Craven and Sean Cunningham's 1972 film that launched a grisly genre of fright flicks for the next generation. Actually, that film was a re-work of Ingmar Bergman's controversial 1960 picture, "The Virgin Spring," which got the Oscar for the 1961 Best Foreign Language Film. The Craven film was an ugly theme of kidnapping and sadistic rape which subsequently set off filmmakers' imaginations, giving birth to slashing and bodily mutilation galore in near-future movies.

The current offering is a movie in which each and every conflict, confrontation and motive is projected at you with crystal clarity with crystal clarity and first-rate production values, yet has nothing to tell you except that violent road thugs do exist and by all rights should get mauled and torn to pieces by those decent folks upon whom they prey.

Intricately measured for audience outrage and anger, plus superb suspense in many supercharged moments, very seriously played out by the lead performers with well-nuanced reactions, it gives admirable attention to often spellbinding emotional pauses and cautious delivery.

In particular, Monica Potter's role as the mother is done quite beyond the call of duty and must be grandly appreciated. The actress delivers an ever tense, subtle and expressive display of apprehensive and fearful responses at often stunning levels.

That said, it must be noted -- what a waste!

There's actually nothing here but mean people who obviously must be killed by nice people because of their sadistic, bloodthirsty and unspeakable deeds. Nothing new is added here, no hooks, tricks or quirks of philosophy or other exposition about our degenerated society, the inner, unique decay in the daranged head of the modern sociopath, nothing about twisted violence. The rape scene here is agonizingly detailed lust, given the boundless fury which the film wants to incite. But it says no more than such an act does happen.

In the current, the story portrays the extremes of the revenge by two perfectly "ordinary" parents, that is, a surgeon father, John (Tony Goldwyn), and a very young mother, Emma (Monica Potter), who will seek to exact justice upon the sociopaths who so badly emotionally and physically damaged their 17-year-old daughter Mari (Sara Paxton) who's a champion swimmer.

It had been that night at her parents' remote lakeside home, which, of importance, has a detached guesthouse and dock, that Mari and her friend (Martha MazIsaac) unwittingly began their ordeal. This had been touched off when a scruffy but gentle fellow in town, Justin (Spencer Treat Clark), got them to come to the motel where he's staying -- he doesn't say with whom -- to get them to score on some top-grade weed. But suddenly Justin's father Krug, his woman Sadie (Riki Lindho) and "Uncle" Francis (Aaron Paul), already shown to be homocidal thieves and hunted by the police, return and claim that the girls are a security risk. These scumbags then grab the girls and, in Mari's dad's SUV, take them off. The girls attempt escape, which only makes matters worse.

After some grisly and gruesome happenings in the woods into which the assailants unknowingly have chosen a turn-off right near Mari's parents's place, these including a rape, they run off and hide in, again unbeknownst to them, Mari's parent's cottage.

When her family learns the whole horrifying story, they will be drawn into their counter-attack on the villains which will have blood and gore galore all over the place.

Oh, yes, you will pay attention. But you may well feel guilty about it when it's all over.



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