THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT – dennis iliadis – 7.5 / 10

More of a thought experiment than an actual film, The Last House of the Left is only intermittently successful as a piece of entertainment. Perhaps that’s because it’s a horror film that requires its audience to think. Or maybe that’s because it's impossible to get sucked into the film without rooting for something horribly violent to happen, which, if the viewer has any sort of self-awareness at all, is something they aren’t willing to do. But for whatever reason the film keeps the audience at a bit more of a remove than most horror films, never scaring or exhilarating as the best of the genre can,

That said, the film is very well directed. Take, for instance, a moment early in the film where Mari is getting dressed. The camera lingers over her body, expressly sexualizing her and making the audience (especially the male members of it) think about what she might look like naked. Then, later in the film, when Mari is assaulted and raped, that desire comes back to haunt the viewer. Director Dennis Iliadis gives the audience what they had seemed to want but in a way that makes them question their own desires.

The same holds true for the violence later in the film when Mari’s parents discover that the people they’ve just taken in for the night are the ones who hurt their daughter and begin exacting their revenge. At first, the audience is completely on their side (to the point of cheering during the screening I attended). But Iliadis and Co. don’t allow any of the murders that John (Tony Goldwyn) and Emma (Monica Potter) commit go down simply or easily. There’s no (relatively) clean gunshots or stabbings in the heart. Francis, their first victim, is beaten and stabbed, has his hand stuck in the garbage disposal and is finally hit over the head with a claw hammer.

And during all this, as the level of violence continues to escalate, John and Emma take a moment to pause and look at each other as if to say, “Yes, we really are going to do this.” And that moment implicates the audience as much as it does the characters. This murder is what the audience paid their money to see but, Iliadis is asking, do they really want it if it's going to be this real and gory?

Still, as smart as all this is (though the sexual aspect of it was swiped from The Devil’s Rejects), it’s really only intermittently entertaining. At around the halfway point the course of the film is pretty much set and it’s just a matter of waiting around to see exactly how the remaining baddies are dispatched. (The audience knows, thanks to an admittedly great but nonetheless spoiler filled trailer, that the parents win this battle so the outcome is never in doubt.) And without the suspense of not knowing who’s going to make it out alive, there’s not really enough to fully engage the viewer.

The film seems to end with a few shots of John and Emma taking Mari to the hospital on their boat. I say ‘seems’ because the film then cuts back to some other time (everyone’s in different clothes, facial wounds sustained during the film are not present, etc.) to find John in the garage with one of the bad guy’s lying paralyzed on his workbench, a microwave positioned around his head. And a moment after that the film really ends on a final gross out gag of the bad guy’s head exploding.

That moment, the part of the trailer probably responsible for the presence of half of the people in the theater (and thus half of the film’s box office take), makes absolutely no sense within the context of the film. It comes out of nowhere, after the film is basically over, and all but invalidates everything that came before it. It’s a moment that was plainly added to juice up the trailer and give viewers (at least the ones who hadn’t picked up on the notion that the rest of the film was criticizing their bloodlust) a last, horrifying kill to cheer at.

I’m almost positive that moment was studio mandated (probably after a test screening where all the cards came back saying, 'Give us more blood!'). And because of that I’m reluctant to hold it against Iliadis. Still, it did leave a bad taste in my mouth after what had been a pretty smart, interesting film. It’s the one instance of violence in the entire film that has no real subtext, nothing on its mind beyond the simple fact of the violence itself. It’s gore for gore’s sake is what I’m saying. And the rest of the film had gone to great lengths to show how that sort of attitude towards violence (even of the on screen variety) is stupid at best and dangerous at worst. The whole thing runs completely counter to what the rest of the film had been trying to say and the fact that it’s probably the one thing most people are going to remember about the film is a shame.

WES CRAVEN'S NEW NIGHTMARE - wes craven - 7.8 / 10

New Nightmare is certainly the best film in the Nightmare on Elm St. cycle. It is also one of the most inventive horror films around and provides the series with a fittingly conclusive ending. The film is set in our (i.e. the real) world where the actors Robert Englund (who played Freddy) and Heather Langenkamp (who played the original Girl Who Lives in the first film) play themselves regrouping to create one final Nightmare on Elm St. But Freddy Krueger invades the real world and starts wreaking havoc.

It seems that, since he's been driven out of his various nightmare realms, he's left with only ours to torment. It's a brilliant idea and the execution is almost as intoxicating as the concept. There's some stuff about Wes's nightmares spawning the films; that he creates them from his dreams; that he is simply a conduit for them rather than the creator of a story. Thus Freddy becomes a sort of spectral ghost relying on the tales in which he is the star to sustain him. Now that the series of films is drawing to a close, he needs to invade our world in order to stay relevant and to continue to exist. He's a story that's fighting to continue being told so that he does not slip into irrelevance and the realm of forgotten bogeymen and childhood nightmares. It's a wonderful concept for a horror film and more importantly it's a fitting conclusion to a cycle of films that, despite the terribleness of most of them, has become ingrained in the consciousness of the American public. Rather than allowing the series to peter out and fade into obsolescence (as these things so often do) Craven revitalized it at the moment of its conclusion. Fitting and wonderful.

RED EYE - wes craven - 6.9 / 10

Better than it has any right to be, Wes Craven's Red Eye still peters out long before its conclusion. But the things that work about it work very well. For instance, the heroine (played by Rachel McAdams) has previously been assaulted and raped. And that previous attack causes her to fight viciously against ever being made a victim again. Thus her attempts to defy the villainous Jack (Cillian Murphy) play not as unbelievable, only-in-the-movies developments but as vital to her character's mental survival. She can't allow herself to be a victim again and thus must resist at every turn. Her actions are entirely believable and motivated. And that makes her one of the strongest women characters in recent film history.

Her character's history of being raped also functions as a metaphor for our collective wounding by the attack on the World Trade Center. With most of the film set on an airplane and involving a plot to kill the Director of Homeland Security, Wes Craven is certainly gunning for our post-9/11 anxieties. The first act of the film plays as a romantic comedy, never hinting that something sinister and dangerous is lurking around the corner. Although that surprise is ruined by the film's trailer and advertising campaign, the idea is that America, pre-9/11, lived the same sort of charmed existence, never thinking anything bad could happen. And when the shit hit the fan on September 11, as in this film, we Americans had a hard time believing that it was really happening. But slowly our resolve hardened just as McAdams's character's does in this film. She and we attack blindly when reflection is probably the safer and more levelheaded course of action. Furthering the 9/11 metaphor, when the terrorists of the film finally mount their attack against the Homeland Security director, the effect of their strike looks eerily similar to the damage inflicted by the planes on the World Trade Center.

So yeah, there's a lot of heady stuff going on underneath the surface of this film. The problem is that most of the stuff happening on the surface isn't that interesting. It's the kind of film I could talk myself into liking but won't really have any interest in ever seeing again. Mostly that's because by the last twenty minutes the film has turned into the standard crazed-killer-with-a-knife-stalking-the-heroine thing. It's just not that interesting at this point because the outcome of this sort of thing is never in doubt in mainstream American pictures.