Dennis Iliadis’s remake of Wes Craven’s 1972 shocker The Last House on the Left is a dismal reminder of just how starved Hollywood studios are for good ideas. Craven’s original was a satirical joke that poked deliberate fun at Hitchcock’s theory of suspense by taking it to a bloody and brutal extreme. Iliadis’s mistake is to reshoot Craven’s thriller as a dead straight drama. Thus, this old-fashioned slasher — the victims are a couple of shapely 17-year-old girls, who look decidedly more interesting when they’re stripped to their underwear at knifepoint — is totally indistinguishable from the usual slurry of studio tripe.
Iliadis’s film trades entirely on the iconic title. He tweaks the original Craven plot to make it seem more credible and up-to-date. But the ingredients are basically the same. Mari (Sara Paxton) is a Paris Hilton blonde on holiday with her parents in a lonely lakeside house in the middle of a forest. She and her best friend, Paige (Martha MacIsaac), are jumped by a small group of unshaven drifters. The mauling of these rich, young girls by these grubby, sadistic males excites the horror. The irony of them knocking on Mari’s parents’ door in the middle of the night to ask for help when the getaway car breaks down is exquisite. Not least because Mari’s parents happen to be extremely skilled surgeons. Enough said.
15, 100 mins