4) Last House on the Left
For all that it’s a loose remake of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, Wes Craven’s directorial debut is a really nasty piece of work. And you know what? The Virgin Spring is pretty nasty too. Let’s look at the tale of the nihilistic tape: In Craven’s version, two young girls buy drugs from the wrong people, and wind up getting robbed, raped and murdered. Bergman’s version is pretty much the same, except the girl’s fatal mistake is leaving her house. Advantage Bergman. Next, through a string of wacky coincidences, the killers have to stay overnight at their victim’s parents’ house, and when the parents notice that the killers are carrying a piece of their daughters’ jewelry, they decide to exact a terrible revenge. But first they need to prepare. In The Virgin Spring, this means watching Max Van Sydow singlehandedly tear down a birch tree so that he can penitently whip himself with the twigs.
Now push it. Push it good!
In Last House on the Left, this means watching Richard Tower set up a series of singularly uneffective deathtraps. (I mean seriously, he soaps up the floor, later causing head killer David Hess to slip, curse, and then stand up and walk out of the room. Totally weak.) Advantage Bergman. Then it comes time for the revenge itself. This is a complex process, but in each case there’s a single act defining act that lets us know that the parents have gone beyond the limits of acceptible retribution. In The Virgin Spring, it’s when Sydow kills a young boy whose only real crime was having an unpleasant group of friends by throwing him into a wall. In Last House on the Left, it’s when the mother, Cynthia Carr, fellates one of the killers almost to climax before biting off his equipment. Advantage (rather definitively), Craven. The making-of featurette has a charming anecdote about this scene. “We were trying to shoot the blowjob scene, and it just didn’t look realistic. So we had him feed the end of his belt through the fly of his pants, so that she’d have something to grab onto with her teeth.” You’ve got to admire their dedication to the craft. Sure enough, the scene is distressingly believable. At the end, Carr jerks her head around like a terrier killing a rat. But this scene is so over the top that it’s pretty easy to shrug off. So what makes Last House on the Left such a punishing film to watch?
At the heart of Joseph Heller’s classic Catch-22 lies something he calls Snowden’s Secret (named after the most singularly unfortunate of all Heller’s unfortunate airmen). Heller talks around this grim idea for about four hundred-odd pages before he finally puts his cards on the table.
“Yossarian was cold too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowdens secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.”
Yeah, so, I don't really have the heart to put a snarky caption under this picture.
This is also the secret of Last House on the Left. There are way gorier killings in horror cinema… but few are so callously biological. Before Hess murders his young victims, he forces one of the girls to urinate in her pants (“That wasn’t a special effect! That was… the real article!” she brags in the making-of video). It’s every bit as unpleasant as the killings themselves, and shares their soul-deadening quality, their reduction of the human organism to its basest animal element, and eventually to mere flesh. Incidentally, this is only really true for the deaths of the innocent young girls. The revenge killings at the end of the film are brutal, sure, but they’re also, for want of a better word poetic. They mean something: they are movie deaths. So in a sense, Last House on the Left backs away from the whole victims-of-monstrous-acts-become-the-monsters-themselves schtick that it tries so hard to sell.
The most disgusting film I have ever seen, is a chinese (i think) movie called “Men Behind the Sun”, it is also very skillful, very gory and based on real events. It tells the story of how Japanese scientist used innocent civilian chinese poeple for horrifying experiments. I one scene a young boy is trapped into being autopsied alive. The special effects are unfortunately very good (looks so real that i think the used some kind of real animal). In another horrifying scene e live cat is thrown into a room full of starving rats. Unfortunately there is no special effects here.
These a just the two scenes that made the biggest impression of me but there are a lot of other disgusting scenes in this movie. It really made me feel bad to see it, much more than “Cannibal Holocaust”.
Mads, that sounds awful. Just terrible. Thanks for sharing! :) I think I *won’t* watch it to see how it compares to CH… you think it’s worse, I’ve got no reason to think you’re lying.
I suppose we might as well throw open the floor, though. What’s the most disgusting movie you’ve ever seen? Can anyone top this?
Something tells me this is a bad idea.
I don’t watch that many horror films because I am a wuss (see my post on It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown), so maybe this sort of thing is par for the course, horror movie-wise. But I can’t stand watching scary movies with rapes in them. They make me feel horrible.
I can’t remember what movie it was, but it was about a house that was haunted by a creepy girl ghost. Anyway, it was later revealed that she was haunting the house because some boys at school had raped and suffocated her with a plastic bag.
The movie could have just told me that, but NOOOOO. I have to see it FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE RAPED GIRL. So I have a plastic bag over my head and am being raped by the movie. Oh, and she tries to escape and breaks off her fingernails (cause, as Jordan said, nails are gross) on the basement floor.
Thanks, movie. I’m scarred for life.
Stokes, I don’t blame you for not wanting to see it. I study film i Denmark (which hopefully excuses misspellings and bad gramma) and a teacher praised the movie, so I thought I ought to see it. I can see why, it really is very, as you put it, skillful. Later I saw a documentary about the events depicted in the film on Discovery Channel and as far as i could tell the move was very accurate. The teacher praised it for the way it dramatizes real events and he found it interesting because it positioned it self somewhere between exploitation and documentarisme. I guess it challenges the viewer by satisfying the lust for cinematic violence and but i comes with a price, because you are actually affected by it and the fact that the events depicted were real makes it impossible to have that distance you normally have to a horror film. However I think for most people who have seen it, it is watched more like sort of a rite of passage, as a test to see how much one can take. For me it was like watching a highway accident I found it very difficult to take my eyes away and afterword i felt unclean for not just turning off. It opens up a question: is the fact that the events are real justification for portraying then in all there horror? My answer would be no. I think that in order to portray something this horrible, there must be some kind of higher meening to showing the gruesomeness, an examination of the mechanism behind such brutal behavior for example.
Oh and nothing justifies letting e real animal be eaten alive by rats!
What are your thoughts on the matter?
Maybe the cat had terminal cancer, making it a mercy kill? I know, I’m going to Hell in a handbasket. But anyway, “Men Behind the Sun” makes me think of the German Doctor Josef Mengele- someone could make pretty much the same movie about him, what with** all of the freaky experiments he did at Auschwitz. But just because they CAN doesn’t mean they SHOULD. I’d rather just read about it in text books or see very corny depictions that don’t really scare me as much as the narration from the History Channel.
You asked for “disgusting movie,” not “disgusting HORROR movie,” so the first movie that came into my head was “Trainspotting.” The combination of my morals, experiences with poverty and addiction and self-medication (personal and closely observed, respectively), astute ability to empathize, desire to have children someday, and with an already hypersensitive/histrionic nature made me *actually vomit* during one particular scene after a painful-to-watch-but-unable-to-stop buildup, at which point I did, I stopped watching. Anyone that has seen this movie would hopefully know what I’m talking about. I knew it was coming, for it was sadly and masterfully quite predictable, given how the movie had been thus far; but still, I reacted physically, and violently so. Before seeing this (and I was a sophomore in college at the time), I had never felt the need to look away for a whole scene during a movie, let alone shut one off- even the scariest ones I had seen, like “The Exorcist” or the “Saw” movies may have caused me to squint or turn my head a little, but I never completely closed my eyes for more than a second or two. But when that particular image came onscreen, I threw up and then cried for over an hour, and I still have nightmares about it. And yes, I understand what the point was- I’m not st00pid, in spite of how I ramble- but goddamnit, that just… Ah, I’m watering up thinking about it.
*Is the phrase “what with” used properly there, Wrather?
Gab – Hey, some people react strongly to things. A guy I know *passed out* after watching the eyeball scene in Un Chien Andalou. Oh, and I think you need to reexamine your definition of “mercy.” ;)
Mads – I think that the fact that it really took place might justify ACTUAL footage of it. No one would, or should, try to censor the stuff the US Army recorded when they were going around liberating people from the concentration camps. But a restaging doesn’t get off the hook. It isn’t documentary footage: it’s an attempt to entertain or manipulate the audience. As such, it should observe certain limits of taste, regardless of the nobility of its intentions… and nothing in your description makes me think that the men behind “Men Behind the Sun” had very good intentions.
And yeah, that thing with the cat couldn’t be more apalling.
Odd, though… I was just thinking of that scene at the beginning of The Wild Bunch where they kill the scorpion by dropping it on an anthill. I couldn’t care less about that one. My sympathy and moral outrage are reserved for vertebrates, I guess?
Oh it was not real footage. It’s a film, with actors and special effects. I agree if it were real footage it shouldn’t be censored, but this is a film that instead of examinating the events, in my opinion, exploits the events for effect. It doesent look like a documentary it is filmed like a movie, i.e. good picture, good sound, good lighting. It has a very loose plotline. A new general comes to the camp and then we see the gruesome experiments case by case, with dates, case nubers and dates. An then in the end the camp is attacked and everything is burned down. It is based on something called Unit 751. Doen’t Google unless you want to loose hope in humanity…
I understood that it wasn’t a documentary. My point (and I think we agree on this) is that Men Behind the Sun can’t pretend that its images are justified just because they are based on true events… they would have to be images *of* the events. And even then, they would have to be handled sensitively.
I’m nominating Suspiria for consideration as well, if only for its bizarre antagonism toward women.
Not that girls fare well in most horror movies, but Suspiria contrives elaborate grotesqueries to make them suffer before slaughtering them. And without the implied Puritanism of the 70s/80s slasher flick (“oh, she took her top off; she’s going to get knifed”). No, the first victim’s crime is looking out a window on a dark night. For this, the killer:
* Stabs her repeatedly in the chest …
* To the point that her still-beating heart is exposed (?!), which he then stabs;
* Chokes her to death with a rope;
* Drops her body on the glass skylight over the lobby of her apartment building …
* Which shatters, killing a friend of hers who’d been running for help by impaling her through the head.
All of this is depicted fairly graphically, with nightmarish color schemes and unreal synthesizers.
I’ve never actually seen the movie. You can find the above sequence on YouTube, though I strongly and sincerely recommend against watching it ever. Profoundly discomfiting.
Dario Argento, the director of Suspiria, has gone on record saying “I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man.” Yeah, that’s not creepy at all. Especially coming from a guy who looks like this.
But for all that he’s a creep, he’s usually held up as one of the greatest and most “artistic” directors in horror. And I’d tend to agree with this consensus. Argento movies never bother me that much: they’re graphic, sure, but everything is so hyper-aestheticized that it’s impossible for me to think of it as real. Even a purely symbolic assault on the female form can be a little upsetting when it’s this extreme… but not to the degree that I find myself taking extra-long showers for the next three days, which is really the kind of film I was trying to capture in this list.
No Argento doesn’t bother me either. When ever I see a movie i really like I feel kind of good afterwards even if the film is sad or disturbing. It’s not that I’m not affected by the material but every time I see something that in my opinion is true art I am glad to have seen it and feel invigorated by it. Thats how I feel about Susperia.To quote Roger Ebert: It’s not what the film is about, but how it is about it.
Didja know about the remake of _Last House on the Left_? So this is a remake of a remake, then?