The Last House On The Left (Wes Craven, 1972)

Bleak, violent and ultra disturbing movie. The Last House On The Left looks painful even today, I can't imagine how would look back in the beginning of the 70s. A film that has violence for main course and desert, a movie that shocks the viewer with its raw look on humanity and a film that is notorious for how ugly it is and how much it disturbed people back in the 70s. The truth is that this movie really makes you lose your patience, it makes you really angry and you find yourself that you barely can hold to what is happening on the screen. But that's how "real" movies are. If you want the real shit you must feel pain, there is no other way. The Last House On The Left is a movie that asks from the spectator to forget that is a human being with a threshold and fragile emotions. This movie calls you to be cruel, to be villainous. To ask for revenge, to fill your heart with pure and raw hate. And that "game" that this film plays with you, this highly flammable emotional situation that it puts you in, is the key to find the beauty of the movie. Because when you are talking about ugly things, the things that you will feel are equally ugly. There are scenes in the movie that have gone down to history of cinema as some of the most cruel, ugly and painful scenes in a movie. These scenes if you look at them carefully are scenes that work on you like a razor. They come and cut you in half. You feel penetrated and mutilated by them. And that's the only way for the movie to make you really feel the horrid events that take place in that film. There is no other way, but the way of pain.

The Last House On The Left is a movie that freezes you. It leaves you petrified, unable to speak or to utter one word of comfort. There is that feeling of deep despair that you feel after the end of that film and it follows for some hours after. There is no doubt, The Last House On The Left is a very pessimistic movie. There are no heroes in that film only human beings who are driven by the most vulgar instincts of survival. I don't think that exists in the history of cinema another revenge story that is so dark. You usually feel that justice has been given when you see a revenge story. Here you feel empty, you feel that they have drained from you all your fucking energy. The Last House On The Left is a movie that really makes you sad. It makes you want to go into your room, lock the door and stay there till the world melts. There isn't even a sign of optimism in that film, there isn't a sign of hope in that movie. It's a horrible ride, a fearful, devastating story about cruel murder and cold blooded, sick revenge. But that's how things work really. It's not that difficult for the most peaceful man to turn into a beast. The film shows that transition brilliantly. When there is pure evil, you answer with the same pure evil.