A commercially streamlined remake of horror magnate Wes Craven’s nasty,
low-budget 1972 original, The Last House on the Left can’t decide
whether it wants to play it straight and grim, or dash headlong into
over-the-top cathartic vigilantism. The moderately executed result
holds sway for half its running time before plot potholes and clashing
tonalities cause the movie to come grinding to a halt.

Buoyed by a stronger pedigree and easily graspable vengeful hook, The Last House on the Left has more ably defined marketing muscle than a similarly brutish box office misfire like Captivity. Almost three years ago to the day, another remake of a Craven property, The Hills Have Eyes, opened to $15.7 million en route to a $69 million worldwide gross. Last year The Strangers, another horror film of rural besiegement, rung up over $81 million worldwide, including a robust $52.6 million Stateside. The Last House on the Left should track somewhere in between, translating smoothly to international genre audiences and also yielding significant pay-cable and DVD earnings.

The story finds 17-year-old Mari Collingwood (Sara Paxton) and her friend Paige (Martha MacIsaac) joining shaggy-haired stranger and fellow teen Justin (Spencer Treat Clark) back at his hotel room for some premium-grade pot. Innocent fun quickly turns dark and terrifying when Justin’s father Krug (Garret Dillahunt), sprung from police custody by his girlfriend Sadie (Riki Lindhome) and brother Francis (Aaron Paul), returns unexpectedly, and decides that Mari and Paige can’t be counted on for silence. A trek through the woods and an abortive escape attempt follow; Mari is eventually raped, shot and left to drown, but not before extracting a physical toll. As a howling storm approaches, Krug and his crew unwittingly seek refuge with the Collingwoods. When Mari finally crawls back home, her parents, John and Emma (Tony Goldwyn and Monica Potter), piece together the truth and take retribution.

Horror films of this sort — rooted in deplorable but recognizably human characters, not bionic killing machines — must locate and trade in polarities, and Greek director Dennis Iliadas (Hardcore), in his English-language debut, has no trouble capturing depravity. In fact, the movie’s opening showcases a desperate hurriedness to prove its degenerate bona fides — not content to merely kill him, Krug taunts a dying cop by showing the man a picture of his family as he strangles him.

But it’s not enough to simply contrast the outwardly idyllic and the nasty. There has to be a collision of latent yet deep-seated moralities, and as the film wears on the script lets Iliadas down. The bad characters all seem sketched by type — the quietly menacing ringleader, the psychopathic henchman, the reluctant innocent and a woman, the latter grouping much more intriguingly handled in The Strangers — and an unlikely brood outside of this monstrous set-up. The lack of care and depth granted the characters means the plot exists only to get us to the set-up for domestic blood-letting. Accordingly, The Last House on the Left feels caught between grim reality — as captured in its unflinching rape sequence — and the gory celebration of exaggerated vengeance, especially since the film extends the parameters of parental retribution present in Craven’s original. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, R, 110 minutes)