In 1974, the BBFC were horrified and appalled about a film that was so sadistic and depraved, with needless violence of such a degree that they refused to allow the film a certificate. 8 years later, and the 'video nasties' scare of 1982 also allowed this film to be banned from video sale within the shores of the United Kingdom.
So, I decided to watch it. The film in question being, of course, The Last house on the Left. The movie itself has festered at the back of my mind for well over a decade, one of those films I never bothered to watch, but I'd heard was so horrendous that the very nature of society threatened to crumble around us if anyone within this glorious nation were to catch even the slightest glimpse of it's visceral content.
This, of course, didn't happen when the film was made available for general release, for 2 reasons.
1 - It's a film.
2 - ...
Actually, I don't have a 2, because reason 1 generally overrides any other excuse I might bother to muster.
The story is thus: A young woman called Mari (I think it's pronounced "Mary", but to be honest I wasn't paying enough attention because I was distracted by someone calling their child "Mari") and her friend Phyllis are going to see a controversial band, Bloodlust, famed for their sacrifices of animals during their shows. I'm going to assume they were some form of metal band, being the music of evil, after all. Mari's a proper wild child. She says words like "tits", which seems to horrify her parents beyond all reason.
Mari and Phyllis prepare for their concert by attempting to buy some pot from some guy on the street. Lo and behold, it turns out that this man is not a friendly neighbourhood drug dealer, at all! Oh noes! He's actually the heroin addicted son of some nutjob who wants a couple of girls to play with. Hilarity ensues.
The rest of the film plays out like some kind of demented pantomime, as the family of nutters 'torture' and rape the 2 girls to a bizarre soundtrack that wouldn't be out of place in a Benny Hill sketch. I say 'torture', but the quality of the acting makes it difficult to differentiate between abject horror and minor nonchalance, the 2 girls having similar reactions to being humiliated and abused as they do to asking if they can borrow the car or spilling a drink.
The girls are eventually killed and the action shifts to the home of Mari's parents, where the dangerous criminals have come to for shelter as their car broke down, or something. Or maybe they ran out of petrol. It's hard to say, I was distracted by something shiny outside. The parents readily offer the mentals shelter, as you do, and a place to stay the night, but when Mari's necklace is spotted, suspicions are aroused, so the parents desperately dash off while the killers sleep, to find (luckily) the exact spot of their daughters body. Fuck knows how, with no evidence their daughter was dead, and the necklace in question being a fairly generic gold symbol of peace on a chain, they must have taken paranoia and prescience to an entirely new level.
But wait, it gets better.
The humble doctor-father and housewife-mother of Mari seem to decide upon a completely unreasonable course of action, where instead of mourning their daughter and calling the police, they instead take it upon themselves to exact cruel and brutal revenge. Where the shift happens or why is left unexplained. I think. Like I said already, shiny things outside.
I have to admit, I never expected the mother to bite off the cock of one of the villainous scallywags, or for the father to take a chainsaw as the only means of bloody retribution available to him, but nonetheless this did indeed happen. And swiftly, too. I think the time between discovering their daughter was dead and the climax of the film was probably only 10 minutes, maybe a little longer, and at no point did the parents seem to bear any ill-will to their victims, but maybe this is what made is such a video nasty that the BBFC felt the need to deny it a release. Not the violence and sadism, but just the appalling direction, acting, screenplay, soundtrack and plot.
The inherent danger with creating controversy around a movie's content is that you guarantee it a shot at infamy and a cult following which the movie itself may not even deserve. This is a prime example of the effect, shooting the movie's director Wes Craven into a spotlight that he, himself, may not have had any right to. Much like his follow-up success, The Hills Have Eyes, The Last House on the Left serves no real function in cinema other than to shock and it wouldn't be for 12 years that he would make his mark with a genuinely original horror.
Though this kind of film's needless violence pales in comparison to today's 'gorno' style of shock and sadism (Hostel, Saw et al), it's release was at a time of very different opinions of what was socially acceptable to allow people to view, a time when organisations like the BBFC felt the need to protect the public from that which they couldn't possibly want to see, or allow their children or friends to see, giving the genre as a whole an inflated sense of appeal. Hopefully these movies will eventually fade into memory, but for the time being they're at the forefront of Hollywood nostalgia as remake after remake of classic video nasty is churned through production with very little thought to whether it's even worth bothering.
As for The Last House on the Left? Give it a miss. It's just a bit shit, all in all.
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