The Last House On The Left
2.5 Waffles!

Sara Paxton stars as Mari – a young teen girl heading out to the lake with her parents, Emma (Monica Potter) and John (Tony Goldwyn). It’s a small town, and their lake house is 6 miles away from the nearest neighbor (you can still find isolated places like that in America?). Sadly, when Mari and her friend, Paige (Martha MacIsaac), meet a young boy, Justin (Spencer Treat Clark), it turns out he is part of a gang of fugitives on the run.

They terrorize the young ladies and leave them for dead, but will the gang be able to keep running when they show up at the lake house, and John and Emma find out what they have done?

I know I just gave you a great deal of the plot, but the plot is not all that important in The Last House on the Left. This movie is all about the suspense, the terror, the emotional roller coaster ride you take and the shocks delivered by director Dennis Iliadas.

Parts of The Last House on the Left are among some of the most intense you have seen in movies this year as this evil gang proceeds to brutalize two innocent young women, and the family displays horrible savageness when they fight back. The audience knows what is coming, but those moments where we are held in suspense just a few moments more waiting for it to happen, or hoping some twist will save the good people, have your heart beating just a little faster, and holding your breath just a little longer.

Most of all, Iliadas makes the audience angry, which prepares us to cheer when Emma and John decide to get revenge. They do what every person sitting in that theater would want to do under the circumstances, and the villains have displayed such abhorrent behavior, we are glad to see them get what they deserve. Iliadas, using the original premise put forth by Wes Craven and Ingmar Bergman, knows how to get under our skin.

Sure, some moments are overly melodramatic, and writers Adam Alleca and Carl Ellsworth provide some silly dialogue, while losing focus by trying to insert an unnecessary story about the family’s previous tragedy, but The Last House on the Left is a movie without pretense or any delusions of what it wants to be.

The Last House on the Left is Rated R for sadistic brutal violence including a rape and disturbing images, language, nudity and some drug use.