SNUFF - This film tends to be hated by complainers who all seem to have bought into an illusion about it being some kind of acme of transgressive grindhouse horror - it isn't, although the much publicised last few minutes rise to the level of 'Last House on Dead End Street' type scummyness. What is it, then? Well, it runs like an incompetent re-edit of a fairly routine 70s expoitation feature with some spliced on hardgore at the end. But that shouldn't be the final word. Viewed in a certain way, this is a gem of inadvertant psychedelia, with a post-Manson wildcat gang stirring up all kinds of vicious shit in the midst of a fog of cut and paste confusion. It won't mess with your head in the way 'A Night to Dismember' will, but it'll come close. If you can accomodate a bit of padding (mostly limited to its first half, and anyway I dug the weirded out but anodyne carnival sequence), then you'll be letting yourself in for several species of strangeness such as casually tossed in incest memoirs, gratuitous shooting of quaint gran and granddaughter, a brilliantly dumb critique of the German arms trade and... well, I've run out of space already, but suffice to say, even before it pisses against the Fourth Wall it'll kind of piss all over your aesthetic regimen. And I don't like jackals either, but I like this.
THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT - The original. Still such a harrowing film! It looks exactly like the kind of movie one might stumble upon in some kind of mouldering cellar beneath the Bowery at midnight, it looks so raw and harsh. It really captures the essence of that sense of grindhouse slime so mythologised these days. Even the questionable stabs at light relief seem sneeringly sadistic given the whole... the pain of the two female leads at the hands of Krug et al is so palpable. "Piss your pants... etc". The film gives out quite ambiguous messages. On the one hand, the target is the middle class American white bread household, reduced to violent rubble by the end, its secret bloodlust now manifest as the truth of class conflict... on the other, the audience is invited to identify with the vengeful rage of the bourgeoise in the same way as 'Daily Mail' readers are expected to cheer when another farmer shoots a burglar. So, subversive or reactionary? Who knows, but definitely exploitative, gruelling and hard hitting. I'll never erase certain moments from my memory - like the bit where Krug forces his son to kill himself, or that scene after Mari's rape where the hoods all look momentarily sickened and depressed at what they've done. On the planet Sorrow, there's no tomorrow etc.
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