LAST HOUSE ON DEAD END STREET - Wonderful seventies horror scum, which feels like it's the result of cinematic mould growing on rancid stock wrapped round a venereally infected porn corpse rather than the work of people with souls and minds not entirely full of evil (I could still be wrong about the last bit). It just oozes the rank atmosphere you kind of always expect from low budget exploitation from this period, but don't always get. It seems to fuse a sort of avant-garde student film approach with clunky grade Z filmmaking, and makes for a dizzying blend of sneering intelligence and stilted incompetence - in the context of a dead serious look at the world of porn going off the rails into snuffland, this really works (I would say it's entirely humourless, but that's not true - there's a lot of caustic wit, somrtimes even playfulness, in evidence during the first half) . Comic porn sniping aside, this is utterly depressing 'Nam era psychedelia as cinema. Despite the sleazy vibe, there's not all that much explicit sex and gore, certainly not by today's standards - but dark weirdness such as a terrified porn producer being forced to fellate a deer hoof during some freaked out ritual murder takes some beating. My fave moment - in the film, but, strangely enough, in almost in all of cinema, and I mean this - is a sequence where a blind man in silhouette walks down some stairs.
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