In researching Wes Craven's "original" version of "Last House on the Left," we learn that it wasn't original at all.
Craven was remaking (I kid you not) an award-winning Ingmar Bergman movie ("Virgin Spring") about a medieval town set upon by violent strangers.
Craven updated it for the 1970s, drawing upon the nation's fixation with the murderous Charles Manson gang - his main villain was a hairy, crazy-eyed marauder.
Ditto this remake, featuring Garret Dillahunt as the killer with the hairy chin, psycho stare and weirdo posse. He's a brawny, seething redneck, preying on a family of privileged urbanites (Tony Goldwyn, Monica Potter) in their rural retreat.
His malevolence, though, is upstaged by the movie's own sadism - it's a typical neo-horror thriller that replaces suspense with grotesque clinical violence.
If someone is stabbed, it's not enough that you see the blade, hear the sound, watch the blood spread.
There's a lingering shot of the knife penetrating flesh, and director Dennis Iliadis leaves the camera there for a full minute, so we have time to absorb the full sickness of the moment.
A subsequent, graphic rape is allowed to run on for several minutes, during which the victim's face is repeatedly pushed into the mud, a close-up that Iliadis returns to again and again.
Does he mean us to be horrified? Titillated?
I'd like to think that a movie studio would not give millions of dollars to a pervert who'd turn such a moment into pornography, but I don't know - there are earlier scenes of the poor girl dressing and undressing, as if Iliadis is whetting an appetite.
It may be his own.
