I doubt anyone is surprised that I like exploitation movies. I further doubt that anyone would be surprised that it irritates me to no end when an exploitation movie tries to pretend above its station and shove some half-assed message down my throat.
Here we have the story of Meg, a girl whose parents were killed in a car crash. She and her polio-crippled younger sister Susan are sent to live with their only other relative, Aunt Ruth. Ruth is a bitter, chain-smoking old bitch, who lavishes upon her sons beer and cigarettes and unsavory advice about life and love, while taking out her hatred for women (her husband cheated on her multiple times, then left her) on Meg and Susan. We also have Davy, the neighbor boy, who is best friends with Ruth’s boys and develops a crush on Meg. Punishment for some minor disobedience ends with Meg tied up naked in the basement, being used for all sorts of undignified and cruel games by the boys, before things spiral wildly out of control and end up with Ruth watching over the proceedings like some ghoulish referee while her sons rape and beat Meg to within an inch of her life, before Ruth herself burns the words “I fuck, fuck me” into Meg’s skin with a hot wire and cauterizes her vagina shut with a blowtorch. When Davy tries to free her, they lock him in the basement with the girls, until he starts a bucket of garbage on fire and beats Ruth to death with one of Susan’s crutches before the cops come knocking when they see the smoke.
Sounds like a pretty sound setup for a stomach-churning torture movie, right? But there are two major problems with it, both of which could have been fixed very easily. First, Meg is tied up and tortured for days, and up until the last few hours, Davy comes and goes from the house with full knowledge of what’s going on. He’s probably 9 or 10 years old, and I don’t care how traumatizing that kind of thing is, at that age you know well enough to tell your parents or a cop if you find that kind of crazy shit going on. He tries to tell his mom, once, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING NIGHT WHILE SHE’S ASLEEP, and never bothers to do it again. The whole thing could have been avoided, except Davy is a stupid sack of shit and should have been the one burned and beaten to death for being such a load. An easy fix would be to have his parents go away for some reason, business, sick relative, whatever, and leave Davy at Ruth’s house. That way, when the shit hits the fan, no one will miss him because he’s supposed to be there, and he has no way out and no one to tell right from the get-go. That’s just bad writing, right there.
Second problem, is the movie is book ended by scenes of Davy as an adult, relating the story and telling about the lessons he learned from it and how it changed him as a person. Here’s where we get nailed with the message, which is something about how the past can be a blessing or a curse depending on what you make of it and how it shapes you as a human being and it tries to be all fucking profound and just comes off sounding like a Deep Thought by Jack Handy.
All in all, though, I find this movie pulling a Night of the Demon on me. Watching it, it just pissed me off, but the more I think about it now, the more I like it. Despite the two aforementioned glaring errors, it’s pretty good. It does an okay job of developing that Last House on the Left-I-need-a-shower-after-watching-it vibe, and had it been made 20 years ago, it would a)probably seem a helluva lot more shocking, and b)most likely have wound up with the kind of cult status that movies like LHotL and I Spit On Your Grave have, with kids trying to get their hands on out of print copies of it on grainy VHS and hiding them from their parents.
Had it been made with a more direct horror/exploitation approach, it probably would have been excellent. As it is, it’s a decent way to kill an evening, and a chick named Meg.
