The Last House On The Left Review

This one comes with more baggage than the carousel at Heathrow Terminal Five. Last House On The Left is a remake of a remake of Ingmar Bergman's 1959 Oscar-winner The Virgin Spring, itself an adaptation of 'Töres Dotter I Wänge', a medieval Swedish folk ballad of child murder and parental retribution. It possibly goes without saying that the Bergman film is about as funny as a burning Punch & Judy booth. Wes Craven's unofficial 'remake' of The Virgin Spring is even less amusing than that. And this 2009 version makes you want to throw in your lot with a doomsday cult.

In Last House '2.0', Mari Collingwood (Sara Paxton) and her girlfriend Paige (Martha MacIsaac) are looking, in time-honoured fashion, to score some reefer when they stumble on a delightful bunch of escaped sex killers led by Krug (Garret Dillahunt), who tortures and murders Paige, and rapes and leaves Mari for dead in the woods. Later, during a storm, Krug and company seek first aid and shelter at the nearest house which, by an amazing coincidence, just happens to be Mari's eponymous home. Her surgeon parents patch them up and put them up - until they learn the truth. Hippocratic oaths may yet be broken...

Plot-wise, this reboot isn't too dissimilar from its predecessors (discounting a tawdry 2005 knock-off called Chaos). But tonally, it's as distinct from its immediate forebear as that film is from The Virgin Spring. Bergman's bleakly powerful work highlights the tensions between deep-rooted paganism and the younger Christian religion, as Max Von Sydow's devout Catholic demonstrably fails to turn the other cheek after discovering that the huntsmen he's sheltering have previously raped and murdered his virginal churchgoing daughter. Jettisoning all theology, Craven's spin on it simply offers the blunt message that violence degrades everybody and that a switchblade in the kidneys begets a chainsaw in the face.