And that brings us to tonight’s movie, which actually is done pretty well surprisingly enough. I still can’t figure out why this of all things got chosen, though. I mean, Friday the 13th is a safe enough bet, because everyone knows the hockey mask and you can take a date to that and point and laugh, but not too many people look at their girlfriend or wife and say, “Hey, how about a night of brutal rape and torture and gory, gory revenge”, do they? I say most, because I married the coolest woman on the planet and we actually do say things like that. Either way, I would guess it made a surprising amount of money. I couldn’t find information on how much it cost to make, but at the time of this review it’s made over $20 million, and I doubt it cost that much to make.

Well, you all know the story by now. Krug Stillo, his son, his crazy friend/possibly biological brother Frank, and their shared girlfiend Sadie, break out of custody and run across Mary and Paige (because no one is named Phyllis any more), two young girls looking to score some pot and have a fun night. Their night is anything but fun, ending with Mary being raped (yup, Paige escapes being raped, even though Phyllis getting raped was the first big gut-puncher in the original) and Paige getting killed (yup, Mary lives in this version, but it actually adds to the story – more on that later). Mary’s parents find out what’s happened, but not until Krug and co. hole up at their place for the night to weather a storm. Parental instincts go into massive overdrive, and brutal, gory revenge is meted out in gloriously over-the-top fashion.

I’ve read a lot of reviews of the original that talk about the moral boundary the movie asks you to cross in rooting for the parents when what they’re doing is just as bad as Krug and co.’s actions. As a parent, I call bullshit on that. If anyone did that to my Beez, there would be a mighty slaying afoot and no moral compunction at all. Hell, I can think of a few people in my personal experience right off the top of my head I’d love to tie between a truck and a power line pole and gun the accelerator, and one of them hasn’t even technically committed a crime. People like Krug can’t be rehabilitated. All you whiny ACLU fucks who think they can should shut the fuck up and die the death of a thousand hammer smashed faces. If you rip away another person’s basic human rights in such a way, you forfeit yours. Rapists and murderers do not feel remorse, they do not get better, they are never purged of that part of them that says, “Go ahead and rape that child”. They waste millions of tax dollars every year being held captive until they die. Tell me, aside from being able to sleep at night because you pussed out and locked a dangerous maniac up instead of putting them down like the rabid fucking dog they are, what good reason can you give me for spending that much money keeping these assholes alive doing nothing but sitting there? They serve no purpose, they don’t better society, just fucking kill them and get it over with.

I suppose I should rein this in and get back to the movie, huh? Well, aside from not really understanding why this remake exists, I have to say it was pretty good. It does some things better than the original, and it does some things not as good.

Let’s start at the beginning. I love the opening sequence of the remake. It features Krug being sprung from custody on the way to jail by Sadie, Frank, and Justin. The cops in the cruiser are telling really bad jokes, and they both die fairly unpleasant deaths, particularly the guy who is forced to look at photos of his daughters while he’s slowly choked to death with his seatbelt. It’s a nice little addition that says, “Hey, you remember those god awful Komedy Kops from the original? Yeah, those guys aren’t going to be in this one”. I wish every movie would open by promising horrible death to odious comic relief.

The sequence with the girls isn’t nearly as brutal as the original, but then what do you expect of an R-rated major-theatrical-release movie? You just can’t get away with stuff like that anymore. Not that I’m saying I wanted to watch a couple of girls forced to piss their pants and hit each other again, but this sequence seems oddly sterilized – almost forced. Instead of seeming like rape is what they had in mind all along, Krug seems to rape Mary out of sheer irritation that she made him crash their escape car. A lot of the sexual menace up until now has been removed, so when the rape happens it almost comes out of nowhere. To this point, you just expected the bad guys to off the girls and move on to their next destination.

Then we come to the major departure between the two movies – the survival of Mary. While having your daughter raped and killed would be about the most traumatic thing I can imagine happening to a parent, the parents in the original had some pretty scanty evidence that this is actually what happened when they start plotting their revenge. I mean, how many teenagers had peace sign necklaces in 1974? If you answered, “Most of them”, you’d be right. Seeing Mary’s monogrammed pendant given to her by her dead brother in the remake clears that up nicely. Also, I would bet that keeping her alive was done for ratings consideration, but I think it adds a lot of drama to the characters of the parents. Their revenge seems a little hot-headed in the original, but dear ol’ dad having to perform impromptu surgery on his little girl in the living room, and then discovering the rape when he checks her body for wounds, gives a lot more impetus to the glorious twenty minutes yet to come.

The fun begins when Frank comes back to the main house (the killers are lodged in the guest house for the night). By this point Mary’s folks have already planned to do something, but Frank showing up kicks things off a little early. Emma starts to seduce Frank when he sees Mary on the coffee table. There’s a struggle, and John comes in just in time to help Emma drown the fucker in the sink. He pulls the drain plug out, which turns out to be an awful idea because John shoves his hand into the garbage disposal and turns it on. Here we’re treated to the second most over-the-top thing in the movie, as Frank stands at the sink for what seems like at least a full minute if not more, screaming his head off as his hand is chewed to a pulp in the disposal before John caves the back of his skull in with a claw hammer.

After a bunch more sneaking around, Justin betraying Krug and Sadie, and Sadie being shot after a brief battle with a shower curtain rod, we come to the main showdown, John vs. Krug while Emma gets Mary situated in their boat for a quick escape. They beat the hell out of each other with fire pokers for a while, and then confusingly we cut to John and Emma and Mary hauling ass across the lake in their boat. But we’re not done yet. Remember what I said about Frank’s hand being ground up in a garbage disposal being the second most over-the-top thing in the movie? Well, I have no fucking clue why this is told as a flashback, but after we see the family escaping across the lake, we cut back to the tool shed. John has paralyzed Krug from the neck down with some drug and stuck his head in an old microwave. Krug wakes up and starts begging for his life as John sets the microwave to the SKULL RUPTURE setting and fires the fucker up. Krug struggles for a moment, but it’s all in vain as we’re treated to a magnificent shot of his face exploding in a geyser of bone and blood before the credits roll.

What I said about the movie not having a socio-political purpose before may have not been all true. Whether it means to or not, a remake of a super-brutal rape/revenge movie done not to horrify but simply to cash in on a trend says a lot about the state of things today. The fact that a group of kids who, I shit you not, couldn’t possibly have been more than nine or ten years old snuck into this thing and were texting the whole time says even more, and it’s a pretty fucking sad message. The fact that you kids with your fancy camera phones and your FaceSpaces and your MyBooks and this culture of information overload that Romero rather heavy-handedly chastised in Diary of the Dead have depersonalized everything to the point that nothing is shocking anymore is a little scary. But it’s not all hopeless. Even though the theater was filled with dumbass teeny-boppers at our showing, the scenes that were intended to be a sledgehammer to the face still shut them up. I can’t possibly not like a movie capable of brutally smashing an unruly audience into submission.

The Moral of the Story: If you plan on holing up in the house of the parents of the girl you just raped and left for dead, make sure you unplug and hide all major appliances with the potential to harm you.

Remake of: The Last House on the Left

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