This poison goes down smooth because Last House is creepy, frightening, and well-executed, as horror movies go. The movie looks as good as any other mid- to big-budget Hollywood picture. The acting is above-average for this kind of thing, the villains are creepy (though made oddly sympathetic at times), and the updates to the original story make the plot far more believable than it was in the amateurish, junk-pile original from 1972.

But rape isn’t something to portray for kicks. It’s a valid element for a plot, but it ought to be handled with care. Unlike other extremes in movies—we see murders all the time, for instance—rape is freighted with cultural and psychological impact that deserves special respect, for both the victims and for ourselves as civilized people. Portray rape once like this and someone will do it again, and again, and then again, and each time we’ll notice and care a little less. That coarsening effect goes beyond entertainment. Ultimately, it makes it harder for us to get along with each other in a civilized society.

The first reaction by many is that “there oughta be a law,” but laws and regulations about this sort of thing are blunt instruments that always reach further than we intend. That’s why we have to take these responsibilities on ourselves.

The makers of Last House either didn’t think or didn’t care about any of this (or pretended their horror remake was performing some service to “art”). Or maybe they just overreached, seeing dailies day after day and losing sight of the impact. Whatever the reason, no matter–they ought to be ashamed to the core.

So, what do do about this kind of thing? Should we urge some kind of statutory action anyway?

Absolutely not.

The price of free speech is that sometimes, people will abuse it, and the result will be to coarsen society and injure the emotions of others. But that’s the price we must pay if the other choice is the introduction of speech police, no matter how clear-cut the issue seems to be. Such rules are the slipperiest of slippery slopes. Of course, we’ve already started downhill, especially on university campuses, where speaking or even holding the wrong opinion can lead to expulsion or firing.

When filmmakers abuse their rights as they’ve done in Last House, they give a little more ammunition to those who would “protect” us (or the culture, or the country, or “the children,” or someone’s conveniently delicate sensibilities) from offensive or so-called “hate” speech. Never forget that there are a whole lot of folks who are anxious to use your offense as a way in–as the first stroke toward harnessing the coercive power of government to control what you can say about that government–plus entertainment, politics, and everything else.

Left and Right once stood together on this: We may have disagreed with what someone said but we would, as Voltaire said, defend til death their right to say it. Now both Right and Left make room for speech cops: Many conservatives make personal morality a public issue, and just as many liberals draft lists of so-called “hate crimes” and verboten ideas in order to punish thought as much as action.

So what’s worse about Last House on the Left, its callous depiction of rape or its incremental assistance to those who would limit free speech? Call it a toss-up.

But the best horror unfolds slowly. This is what made the first half of the original so watchable (the second half is even better). We knew the 1972 gang was dangerous only through radio reports, but when we meet them they’re obviously twisted but also rather buffoonish. Even the girls don’t take them seriously when they’re first kidnapped. Because we haven’t seen with our own eyes what the kidnappers are truly capable of, until the final, awful moments we hold on to the idea that the girls might be let go or even outwit their captors. Unlike the remake, the visceral is emotional, not visual. The horror comes from the death of hope and the slow realization that this depraved nightmare isn’t going to end.

When it comes to horror, there’s good dread and there’s bad dread. The former is the fun version when you put your hands over your eyes dreading what’s coming next. The latter is when you just want the punishment to end so you can go home, which unfortunately defines the redo of “Last House on the Left.”

Dad (Tony Goldwyn), Mom (Monica Potter), and daughter Mari (Sara Paxton) head out to their beautiful but secluded lakeside home. Mari can’t wait to get away. Mom’s not too sure, but Dad gives her the car keys and some spending money so she can hang out with her local friend Paige (Martha Maclsaac).  Paige is a little wilder than Mari, who’s given up some earlier bad habits to concentrate on swimming, but when Justin (Spencer Treat Clark - Bruce Willis’ son in “Unbreakable”), a shy, troubled boy their age, overhears Paige wish she had a little weed, he offers to hook them up.  

He takes them to a local motel and they get high and just start to bond when the Manson Family walks in. Seems Justin is Krug’s son. On the run and with their pictures on the front page of every newspaper, the girls can’t be set free. The original idea is to take them along as hostages, but things happen that I won’t spoil and the nightmare begins.

The central and most controversial is scene is a horrific and relentless rape that’s both exploitative and gratuitous. After all, we can’t hate these people any more than we did in the opening sequence and so there’s no dramatic purpose to serve. In the original, this scene is much uglier, still gratuitous but actually serves a couple dramatic purposes (it’s also the second rape, the first happens earlier off camera). The competence of the staging and shooting of the moment also works against the remake. Instead of the documentary feel of the cheapie original that only heightened the you-are-there horror, this feels slick – like someone’s doing it because they can, not to move the story or deepen the drama.

**Spoilers coming**

Things improve somewhat when the killers, without knowing it, look for shelter from the storm in the home of Mom and Dad. You don’t need me to tell you this makes for some tense moments. But after a promising beginning this sequence eventually falters and falls prey to the tropes of the genre: Dark house, stormy night, electricity out, phones not working — and to heighten the horror, Mom and Dad doing a lot of dumb things like splitting up when they shouldn’t but of course returning just in time to save the day with a potted plant or some such thing.

The best scene is a prolonged killing where every gruesome household item you can imagine (and a few you can’t) comes into play. The taking of this life is long, bloody brutal, mostly silent and probably inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s “Torn Curtain” (1966) where the master decided to show audiences how difficult it is to kill a man with a protracted sequence involving Paul Newman that ends (if memory serves) with Wolfgang Kieling’s head in a gas oven.

Ultimately, for this kind of film to pay off – meaning, for all the nastiness we’ve been forced to watch to be worth it – the revenge scenes must make it worthwhile. We have to feel for the parents and also feel the sweet release of watching bad guys get what they got coming. But this never happens. There’s one moment where Dad girds Mom for battle and you think it’s finally on, but it’s a feint. What I wanted was to see was the parents plan, plot, scheme, grab control, turn the tables, and then without a hint of mercy take those bastards down one by one for what they did to those girls. Instead we get the standard dark, scary house – cat and mouse nonsense, you can see most every night on the Lifetime Network.

The usual-usuals are predictably up in arms over the film’s violence as though “Last House” achieves some sort of new low when in reality there’s nothing  more graphic here than watching a 13 year-old Linda Blair masturbate with a crucifix in “The Exorcist“ (1973). In fact, the murder/rape scene in the original is much harsher, involving the worst kind humiliation before the rape, which is even more sadistic. The problem isn’t what’s shown or done on screen, the problem is that the film is such a dramatic failure that the brutality feels as though it’s there for the sake of brutality. Piously railing against violence is missing the point. A better approach might be to advocate for better movies.

But one point in the movie bears noting–the use and applause for waterboarding.

The story of “Last House” is that of a girl and her friend tortured by a gang of criminals. The girl (Sara Paxton, who “graduated” from kids’ show “Darcy’s Wild Life” to snuff-porn–talk about regressing)  is raped and left for dead.  When her parents discover that the people they welcomed into their house are the perpetrators, they take revenge.

Among the revenge mechanisms the parents employ to kill these thugs is waterboarding.  They waterboard one of the thugs in the kitchen sink (and do something else far more disturbing–a stunt that criminals committed in the William Devane vehicle, “Rolling Thunder“).  I watched the audience rightfully applaud this.  The guy was a brutal killer and accessory to rape.  He deserved it.  It’s the true justice we rarely see in our clogged, broken “justice” system.  And I remember that the audience also applauded when Wesley Snipes waterboarded a (non-Muslim) terrorist hijacker in the airplane toilet in “Passenger 57.”  He deserved it, too, and Snipes was trying to save the people on the flight.

So, I ask myself (and you), why do Hollywood liberals applaud the use of waterboarding on a criminal thug who only tortured and/or murdered two women and on a non-Muslim airplane hijacker, yet it’s not okay to do it to men  like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who murdered 3,000 Americans and knows of future plans to snuff out many more?

Yeah, I know, it’s “only a movie.”

But if it’s so bad and so noxious to Hollywood libs, maybe they should try to take it out of movies on which they make oodles of money, the way they’re being urged to do with smoking.

And if it’s so bad, why do American audiences cheer when criminal thug murderers get deservedly waterboarded onscreen?  They cheer because they support it.  This is what America wants us to do to save lives.

And I say, before President Obama closes Gitmo, let’s install a special “Passenger 57″ airplane toilet (and a “Last House on the Left” kitchen sink).  We can send Wesley Snipes there to do his dirty work and work off the taxes he evaded (for which he was prosecuted).

That’s a criminal sentence I’d support.

–

This Friday comes a remake to look forward to; a do-over of Wes Craven’s “Last House on the Left” (1972), one of the all-time classic horror flicks. Some have come close, but when it comes to the pure art of creating a sense of oppressive, grinding dread that stirs the guts with a spoon, there’s no other film like it. Just watching the trailer again (it’s only a movie, it’s only a movie, it’s only a movie…) gives me the willies, and anyone who knows me will tell you I don’t throw the word ”willies” around lightly.

On the DVD commentary, listening to Craven explain the left-wing overtones he aimed for is nearly as entertaining as the film itself. Explain it all you want Wes, but all the blah-blah-blah in the world can’t change the fact that what we’re watching is hippies get theirs with a chainsaw, which is one lovely way to spend an evening — not unlike the many memorable evening’s spent re-running ”Easy Rider’s” final moments.

In the horror department, Hollywood’s failure rate with remakes – at least when it comes to some of my favorites — isn’t so bad. Recent retreads of  ”Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “The Hills Have Eyes,” and “Dawn of the Dead” were all worth the price of admission, and along with “Last House on the Left” represent four of my five favorite 70’s horror classics.

For the record, number five is “Halloween” (1978) which Rob Zombie–  …Well, unfortunately, for Lent I’ve given up both what needs saying about Mr. Zombie’s film and how to say it. We’ll talk after Easter.

“Everything is working.” That’s what one studio exec told me today. “With the exception of the Jonas Brothers, it seems like almost every release is out-performing expectations.” January 2009 has gone down as the all-time 8th-best month in modern box office history. It started with excellent holiday holdovers. Six movies, technically released in 2008, did major chunks of their business after New Year’s.

2008 RELEASES WITH MORE THAN $50M IN 2009 TICKET SALES
1. Gran Torino (Warner Bros) – $132.7M
2. Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight) – $92.8M
3. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Paramount) – $72.7M
4. Marley & Me (Fox) – $69.5M
5. Bedtime Stories (Disney) – $52.75M

Then there was the surprise phenomenon of Paul Blart: Mall Cop (Sony), a low budget comedy from producer Adam Sandler and starring former King of Queens star Kevin James. The movie opened to over $30M on the weekend of January 16, and it is now closing in on $130M. The other $100M hit so far in 2009 is Taken (Fox), the Luc Besson-produced French import, which delivered excellent grosses in Europe before landing in the US. With a star turn by Liam Neeson, Taken had already delivered $11.2M in the UK, $9.4M in France and $5.5M in Spain before it went wide in the US on January 30. The picture has held up extraordinarily well with $108M domestic to-date.

The movie industry is 14% ahead of last year’s January-February take of $1.5 billion and a full 23% stronger than the first two months of 2007, which posted just over $1.35 billion. It’s fair to start speculating about the possibility that 2009 will be Hollywood’s all-time box office high water mark.

March has a definite shot at topping $800M, which would be a third straight monthly record. Watchmen (Warner Bros) looks huge starting Friday (I’ll post a prediction later in the week), Last House on the Left (Universal) appears to be a solid genre pic on Friday the thirteenth along with Disney’s excellent family offering Race to Witch Mountain. On March 20, Duplicity (Universal) starring Julia Roberts and Clive Owen has 25+ appeal and Dreamworks/Paramount is sky-high about I Love You Man. And the month rounds out with Monsters vs. Aliens from Dreamworks Animation.

Back-to-back-to-back all-time monthly records and almost $2.6 billion in the bank by March 31 would be further proof that the movie business is recession proof. In fact, the more dreary the economic news becomes, the more Americans seek refuge at movies. Instead of the annual trip to Disney World or a getaway cruise in the Bahamas, people seem to be spending their pocket change at America’s multiplexes in droves.

Steve Mason is on Facebook and now also on Twitter.