Directed by Dennis Iliadis
There are always more differences than resemblances between a remake and the original film upon which the remake is based. The reason may be that a remake is always tempting and gives a director the chance to show his version of the story, in one's own directorial style. The things seem to be this way in the third version of the slasher classic The Last House on the Left, a version Wes Craven no longer directs, but comfortably produces. As a matter of fact, the whole movie looks like a beautifully-packed present for Craven, as it extends the story that made him famous for some (or infamous, for others) to a total run of two hours. The 40 minutes added allow Hollywood fresh face Dennis Iliad to add a good amount of significant details to the plot and to show some more complex characters, while the main story doesn't add much to the already known facts: two girls are abducted and tortured rapaciously by three ex-convicts, who happen to ask incidentally for shelter the same night to one of the girl's parents. If there is a reverence shown to Craven in the remake, it doesn't mean only copying the plot, but building a whole net of very little details that point to the original 1972 film: the post box, the necklace that allows the parents to recognize the assassins of their daughter and, above all, the aquatic sequences, beautifully filmed, all recommending Iliadis not only as one of Craven's fans, but also as a skillful translator of the film's initial intentions: to show a raw, uncensored version of cinematic violence.
There is still an obvious difference between Craven and Iliadis, as the latter seems to speak rather to a public of Craven-loving movie buffs. His purpose seems to be the making of a respectful version of the original, while Craven's version looked a lot more like a irreverent movie, made in spite of the audiences. It was the audience's expectations regarding violence that Craven was targeting back in 1972, as much as the subject had a lot to do with the end of the hippie era, as the violence ended a whole mythology of love and peace. The brutal murders in Craven's film were filmed having in the background folk and psychedelic rock and those who were to listen could hear clearly the message: while there was still plenty of talking about non-violence in the early seventies and the girls still wore hippie necklaces, in the underground America the violence was still creeping, as irrational as the project of the sixties was ecstatic. The late 2000s lost, of course, the movie's background and Iliadis had to make a choice about replacing it with something else. Pitifully, the choice wasn't inspired at all, as his conformist approach mixes the violent scenes with the kind of orchestral score that you would normally expect from a thriller. It's not the film's only moment when Iliadis, initially chosen by Craven after seeing his debut, Hardcore, seem to work after recipe. If there is an anarchist side of Iliadis, recurrent in Hardcore, there is also a highly conventional one; this becomes obvious in one of the key moments of the film, in which one of the girls is followed by the aggressors, set up in slow motion and with cheesy violin score. And this is the point that Iliadis misses: the 1972 movie stand against effects that avoided straight violence, the scenes were meant to be shown in real-time, and Iliadis becomes conventional almost every time he wants not only to euphemize violence, but to make it dramatic, to show violence into a stage light opposed to Craven's ruthless naturalism.
The Last House on the Left, the original version, had its moments of kitsch, the kind of scenes a director would forget while making a remake. And Iliadis does indeed a different film out of The Last House on the Left. Nevertheless, even if the mother's revenge doesn't involve a felatio first anymore, as it did in the 1972 version and the movie becomes less unbelievable and exaggerate, the violence remains one of the movie's strongest characteristics. What lacks, though, is Craven's infinite despair. For Wes Craven, no one was innocent in the movie, and no one abruptly converted from violence, eventually, it converted to violence. Hence, while Craven's film was unbearable and suffocating, Iliadis makes it only thrilling, eventually disturbing. The Last House on the Left becomes, in this 2009 version, ambiguous towards human nature, while it evolves into something more complex and arty. Hard to say if this is also the trend in today's horror movies, but it illustrates beautifully the way old Hollywood reinvents itself today, aided by talented newcomers.
