As you may have already noticed on your own behalf, remakes are big business in Hollywood these days. Luckily?, this involves lots of horror remakes. Actually, I’m pretty sure luckily does qualify a lot of the time. I liked Wes Craven’s original The Last House on the Left, both on its own individual merits and because it seems to mark the transformative moment between all the old monster movies and Hammer pictures and such and today’s modern horror genre, chock full of slashers, torture, and overblown morality.[1] While the Wes Craven-approved remake cannot possibly live up to words like “transformative moment in genre history”, I think it might have been otherwise better than the original.

In short, some kids (the important one of whom looked what turned out to be a disturbing amount like my friend Emily) get mixed up with the wrong family of murderers while on vacation at the lake. Some deaths happen, and some rapings happen, and it is generally speaking a horrible and uncomfortable thing to watch on the screen, on par with the horribleness of the first half of I Spit on Your Grave, and for mostly the same reasons. Because, when the family of murderers shows up in a driving rainstorm at the lake house where her parents are expecting her back tomorrow, and they are looking for shelter from those parents, and nobody yet knows about the tragedy tying them all together? When this point in the movie comes the audience is almost as bloodthirsty as the parents will soon become, and they needed that horribleness to get there.

I guess what I liked about it over the original is that it didn’t have quite as much direct correlation between teens having sex and doing drugs and lying to their parents the way teens will do, and violent, disproportionate punishment at the hands of crazy people who are nevertheless a little bit vindicated by virtue of being punishers. The more realistic the movies get, the more that particular message from the ’70s changes from amusing to disturbing. Plus, even once the main event is finally on the menu[2], there’s a lot more tension and cat-and-mouse to it than the kind of non-stop actual torture scenes you get out of the second act of a Hostel knock-off.

But still, it’s pretty brutal in pursuit of justifying a payoff that you may not have wanted all that badly in the first place (though, if you are trapped in a theater and made to watch, I predict you’ll want it by the time it comes due), so I really cannot recommend it to anyone who hadn’t already intended to see it anyway. Because, after all is said and done, it doesn’t even have the historical importance of Craven’s original, which I also probably wouldn’t recommend to most people.

[1] While I freely admit that doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement, I guess we all have a tendency to cling to that with which we grew up.
[2] Get yer mixed metaphors Right H’yere! Piping hot mixed metaphors!