CRYSTAL LAKE MEMORIES (3-disc DVD set)

After serving up the puerile pizza of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, Sean S. Cunningham found even more unlikely success but with a much higher calibre of exploitation when he directed the first of the FRIDAY THE 13TH series. This set in motion the most enduring of all post-war horror franchises. Before I delve into reviewing each movie over the next fortnight, I highly recommend fans of the series get this fantastic panoramic documentary, which examines the making of each film in geek-tastic detail across seven hours. It even includes the three season TV series. Unlike a lot of documentaries, the makers show the writers, directors and producer Frank Mancuso Jr voicing some criticism along with the inevitable group love-in. I don't look for dissent in these things, but it always comes across as more realistic when filmmakers are allowed this in the final edit. Occasional disappointment is expressed at how a planned vision was carried out, directors Danny Steinman and John Beuchler come under limited fire for their hack work or inexperience respectively.

One of the valuable aspects of an epic series overview like this is in mapping out the perils of how to keep a long-running franchise fresh. They usually follow a set course: the difficult 'second and third album' issues of trying to give fans reimaginings of the same template for a while, followed by an inevitable shark-jumping into understandable refreshment risks with a tired format, then culminating in poor box office results that inspire the concerned producers to then revert back to what they hope is a still lucrative source well to draw from.

On that note, I look forward to seeing and posting here NEVER SLEEP AGAIN which takes a similar in-depth look at the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET series before getting my gloved claws into those offerings too...

LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972 - 2-disc special edition)

Every once in a while, a film comes along that's so bad that it's more fun to write about than watch. This is the case with LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972). In fact, it's so abysmal that I've reactivated my encyclopaedic two-years dormant History of Horror Cinema blog to celebrate it. Before Sean S. Cunningham's FRIDAY THE 13TH franchise joined forces (farces?) with Wes Craven's NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET series, they teamed up more directly as producer and writer/director respectively on this $90,000 rape exploitation horror thriller. To those who don't know its reputation, this may seem a mouth-watering prospect - until you see it. "To avoid fainting, keep repeating to yourself: it's only a movie!!!" shrieks the infamous poster tagline. Don't worry - it's arguably much less.

The plot can be boiled down to simply this: two young, healthy, personable women go out for the night and are tricked into being tortured to death by a gang of psychopaths. The group then target the parents of one of them which leads to their comeuppance. Very loosely based on Ingmar Bergman's THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960), the scene is set for eighty minutes of an atrociously executed feature film by people who should have known better in more ways than one.
Where do I start? Well, we are treated to handy thumbnail rap sheets of the escaped prisoners by a radio announcer who describes them as one who murdered a priest and two nuns, another who hooked his own son on heroin 'to keep him under control' and the third who was serving a life sentence for 'child molestation, Peeping Tomism, and assault with a deadly weapon'. Cuddly Godber and Fletcher on the run in PORRIDGE: THE MOVIE they are not. They are also accompanied by a sadistic young woman who is just as amoral as the men.
The capture, extended torture and murder of the two women manages to be badly acted, dull and offensive in equal measure. It's almost impossible to imagine how Cunningham and Craven justified this as entertainment or valuable post Vietnam angst transgressive cinema. Only David Hess, who doubled as both lead actor and composer/performer of the (ironically sweet?) country songs as the first of his oeuvre of horror movie psychos , gives a half-decent committed performance, wearing a chilling perpetual grin for most of the second half as he gleefully dominates the sordid mayhem. The rest of the cast act as if overdosed on cough mixture.
The instrumental music gives a whole new meaning to 'score' as it grates self-consciously on the viewer like the work of a rusty pen-knife. Often, the single finger Moog synth plinkings are comparable to letting a cat wander across a keyboard. And, for stupefying inappropriateness, listen to the comedy single notes timed with the knife stabbings to the chest of one of the women. Maybe they figure a clown's car horn would have enhanced the concentration camp scenes in SCHINDLER'S LIST.
I can reserve a morsel of charitable feeling for Martin Kove, later to rescue himself with THE KARATE KID and TV's CAGNEY AND LACEY amongst others, who plays a dim-bulb Sheriff's Deputy with excruciating unsubtlety. He and his boss spend most of the film ambling along on the outskirts of the plot as a slow-witted bumbling twosome as though their scenes were spliced in from a 70s porn film. Fortunately they arrive too late to stop the only highlight of the film, a climactic shotgun versus chainsaw fight between Hess and the main female victim's father whose home the gang charmed their way into. More could have been made of this final section as the father turns out to be a surgeon with the McGyver-esque resourcefulness to trap his invaders.
In case you feel the ending swerves off the road into respectful professionalism, never fear, since the end credits steer us back on the road to shame by displaying sunny clips of each named cast member underscored by more upbeat country music. After all, this is not the tasteless exploitation of female subjugation - it's an episode of THE DUKES OF HAZZARD. On the plus side, there's a great 40 minute documentary on the special edition featuring most of the main actors, Cunningham and Craven - and a second one where Gunnar Hansen and Hess credibly argue the merits of classification versus censorship after a British screening of LAST HOUSE and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.