Recently I tracked down a copy of the movie The Last House on the Left. I knew nothing about the movie except for the fact that it was written and directed by Wes (Nightmare on Elm Street) Craven and produced by Sean (Friday the 13th) Cunningham. With a pedigree like that how could I not check this one out. For those of you who don't know Last House... is the story of two girls who get picked up by some sleaze balls. The sleaze balls rape and gruesomely kill the girls out in the woods. When the sleezeballs car breaks down they end up staying in the house of one of the girls that they killed. The parents find out what the people did and kill them in some of the most gruesome ways ever imagined. Even though I had no real clue what this movie would be like as I watched I realized that this movie was nothing like I had expected. After I had watched it I had a list of complaints against the movie a mile long.

1. The music -- I realize this was the early 70s the age of bad synthesizer music but this stuff was some of the worst bad synthesizer music that I have ever heard.
2. The sound recording -- Was that microphone in the same county as the actors? When Robert Rodriguez made El Marichi he had to dub all of the actors lines, using a cassette tape recorder and a Radio Shack mic no less, and it sounded better than this.
3. The actors unnatural ways of speaking -- As I watched the movie I was distracted by something about how the actors were speaking. At first I couldn't figure out why it sounded so strange, than I figured it out. The actors are supposed to be chatting with each other but they are projecting their voices like they are on stage and the audience can't here them. They were probability told to speak up so that the microphone could pick up their voices.
4. It's so casually gruesome -- When we get to the scene where the villains kill the girls the whole way the scene is shot makes it stomach churning awful. Now I am not by nature a squeamish person. I have seen Strange Days, 8MM and The Evil Dead all of which I loved; but this was beyond horrific. The worst thing was during the murder of these girls there was some of that bad synthesizer music playing a rather upbeat tune.
5. It's not relay a horror movie -- Since I saw it in the horror section I figured it would be a horror movie. Horror can mean many things to many people but this not horror. The best thing that I could come up to describe this one is shock-splatter. After a horror movie you should be frightened during and after the film. I was not scared I was sickened. I like to snack while I watch movies but I couldn't even take a bite when I think about this stuff.

A little while after viewing Last House... I was surfing the Internet Movie Database and I took a look at the page for last house and I took a glance at the user reviews of the movie. And I was rather surprized to see a majority of rather positive reviews. I was stunned, than I figgured it out. One of the reviews called it a drive in review. Than I realized that the diference between me and these people was that I have seen plenty of on screen gore, I watched this with an idea of how great Wes Craven can be and I watched it in the afternoon alone. These people were 18 years old back when it came out they were looking for a good time crusing into the drive-in with their buddies while drinking beers. This type of move had gore that they had never seen. It didn't matter how the sound was or how the violence was treated they had never seen anything like it before.

It is that generational reletivity that explaines Why stuff like the old Batman show, The Brady Bunch, and Barbarella were so popular in their own days. With such things in out own pop culture as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena, and even Scream I often wonder what will be remembered as a relic of it's time and what will be thought of as a true classic.