Psycho drama - Entertainment, Movies - Army Times

Psycho drama

For fans of really trashy B-movie splatterfest horror, one of the greatest and most disturbing double features imaginable would be 1972’s “The Last House on the Left” and 1977’s “The Hills Have Eyes,” both of which wear their complete lack of socially redeeming value as a badge of honor.

These films — the first efforts of writer-director Wes Craven, who would hit it big (sort of) in the mid-’80s with “A Nightmare on Elm Street” — are the direct ancestors of the modern “Saw” and “Hostel” franchises.

Since Hollywood eventually must remake everything, we got a new “Hills” in 2006 that actually added a layer of social relevance with a cleverly subtle anti-nuclear message. (No fooling.)

So, of course, a remake of “Last House” was inevitable. But director Dennis Iliadis and writers Adam Alleca and Carl Ellsworth, whose combined résumés wouldn’t fill a shot glass, are ill-equipped to reach a higher plane.

Their film has its share of gruesome scenes but is actually tamer than the original, which tapped an otherworldly level of depravity.

The acting and production values are more robust here, but the basic plot is much the same: A trio of sociopaths terrorizes vacationing white-collar suburbanites. Most of the action is set in a remote lake house on the usual dark and stormy night.

The sociopaths are Krug (Garret Dillahunt, turning in as nuanced a performance as you may ever see in this kind of film), his slutty gal pal Sadie (Riki Lindhome) and his ferrety brother Francis (Aaron Paul).

Also along — against his will — is Krug’s wimpy teen son Justin (Spencer Treat Clark), who wants no part of the spree but lacks the stones to defy Dad and run away.

The good guys are 17-year-old Mari (Sara Paxton) and her parents, John (Tony Goldwyn) and Emma (Monica Potter).

The film wastes no time getting viewers hissing at Krug, who brutally murders a cop when he is sprung from custody by Sadie and Francis in the opening scene.

After a setup sequence in the woods with Krug’s gang and Mari (which features a graphic rape that is still less intense than the original’s), the action moves to the lake house, where good and evil stage a steel-cage match.

If there’s a glimmer of anything deeper than plain-old bloodletting going on here, it’s in the bad dad/good dad contrast between Krug and John. The film does zippo with this thread, but it’s there, for whatever that’s worth.

As brutal as it is, the film strokes a taut and intense chord — until it crashes and burns in a tacked-on, nauseatingly gratuitous finale that closes the loop on a much earlier scene featuring a balky microwave oven.

This finale either (a) is designed solely to make audiences howl at its shock-and-schlock value, or (b) is an existential and nihilistic riff on the notion that as a species, humanity is beyond all hope.

I think I’ll go with (a).

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Rated R for all the usual trashy B-movie splatterfest horror reasons. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com.