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Monday, August 10, 2009

BD impressions: The Last House on the Left (2009)

2:05 PM / BD Impressions / 6 Comments

As I mentioned in a previous post, it's somewhat unusual for me to show any real interest in a horror remake. Ordinarily, you'd be more likely to find me railing against them and decrying the lack of originality in Hollywood today. That said, I'll be the first to admit that originality is overrated. Yes, it's nice if a director can come up with something new, but it's not the most important aspect of a film. If a film is derivative but well-made, I'm generally inclined to look favourably on it, and in any event, I've said in the past that, instead of remaking the classics, the film industry should put its collective talents to far better use by revisiting its disappointments: good ideas that were poorly executed.

I'd class Wes Craven's original 1972 The Last House on the Left as an example of this. It's a straightforward enough tale: two girls are abducted by a group of sadists and are humiliated, tortured, raped and ultimately killed. The parents of one girl get wind of what happened and exact their own brand of personal revenge against their daughter's attackers. This rape/revenge framework has been used to considerable success elsewhere, including in Aldo Lado's Night Train Murders, perhaps the best of an array of Last House rip-offs. (Of course, as has been pointed out, Craven's original in fact takes its cues from Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring. But then again, The Virgin Spring is a retelling of a thirteenth century Swedish poem. Like I said, originality is overrated.) Craven's film is an exceedingly nasty piece of work - grubby, sordid and deeply unpleasant in just about every way imaginable. Unfortunately, it's also extremely clumsy, clearly the work of an inexperienced filmmaker, and the decision to continually cut away from the torture of the two girls to comic relief sequences featuring the idiotic local police simply boggles the mind. (Compare this with Meir Zarchi's notorious I Spit on Your Grave,* an even nastier and similarly flawed film that at least maintains a consistent atmosphere.)

So yes, I'm less inclined to automatically dismiss a remake of Last House than I am, say, Suspiria or Poltergeist (both of which are in development, by the way). I'd read mixed things about Dennis Iliadis' 2009 offering, ranging from utter condemnation to more considered appraisals. For instance, Mark Kermode, a critic whose opinions I always enjoy even when I disagree with them, argued that, while the new version solved a lot of the original's plot holes and problems with tone, by cleaning it up and ironing out the flaws it somehow ceased to have any purpose. I mention this because that's very much the opinion I came away with when watching it for myself. Yes, removing the goofy comic relief elements works wonders, and there is in fact a scene in this version that is more horrible than anything in the original,** but somehow the whole is less than the sum of its parts. It's well-made and genuinely artful in places (there are some fantastic-looking moments involving a lake during a rainstorm), and has some good performances, particularly from Sarah Paxton as one of the victims, but it all seems a bit too slick, too efficient for the subject matter. Looked at objectively, it's a better film than the original, and it does change enough of the narrative for there to be a couple of genuine surprises along the way, but as Kermode said, the original was so much about the period in which it was made that, detached from it, it begins to lose a lot of whatever meaning it might have had.

By the way, whoever thought that microwave incident would be a good idea needs to have their head examined.

Image quality: Terrific. Stunning. Mesmerising. Spellbinding. In all but one area, these superlatives are an accurate description of this disc. The image is detailed throughout, and the natural film grain, which alternates between light to moderate during brightly lit scenes and becomes somewhat heavier once the lights go out, appears unmolested. Rather than using seamless branching, Universal have opted to place two separate encodes - R-rated and unrated - on the same disc, and here is where the problems begin to creep in. I strongly suspect that the bit rate has suffered because of this decision, and as a result compression artefacts do become visible, particularly when the grain is heavier, causing the encoder to choke. It looks pretty pronounced in one or two of the shots below (see Example 4 and Example 6), and to be fair it looks considerably better in motion, but ultimately it's a shame Universal didn't either use seamless branching or omit the R-rated version entirely. (The captures below are from the unrated version.) 9/10

The Last House on the Left (2009)
studio: Universal; country: USA; region code: ABC; codec: VC-1;
file size: 21.4 GB (unrated), 20.8 GB (R-rated);
average bit rate (including audio): 26.99 Mbit/sec (unrated), 27.14 Mbit/sec (R-rated)

* I note that a remake of I Spit on Your Grave is currently also in production. Given that the cornerstone of the original version was a brutal half-hour rape scene, I wonder just what Hollywood is going to have to do to make it palatable to a mainstream audience.

** I'm referring, of course, to the rape of Mari, which apparently resulted in walk-outs during theatrical screenings, even in its toned-down R-rated state. Incidentally, the notion of "toning down" a rape scene strikes me as an incredibly reprehensible act, suggesting as it does that, by softening the horror, the rape somehow becomes more "acceptable".

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