Films That Witness Madness

review

LAST HOUSE ON DEAD END STREET

This is a criminally underrated film. That's not to say it's GOOD in the classical sense, but it is a singular piece of work; trippy, disturbing, hilarious and stomach churning all at the same time. It operates on both the H.G. Lewis level and on the basement art house level. It is amateurish but that is to it's benefit. It's also disgusting, nauseating, aggravating and wholly reprehensible, but, again, that's to it's benefit. LAST HOUSE ON DEAD END STREET doesn't operate like a normal film. It doesn't entertain, it doesn't enlighten, it doesn't promote a message of any sort. It exists as an experience. In a genre full of films that promise transgression and a violent assault on the senses, LAST HOUSE ON DEAD END STREET is one of the few that genuinely delivers.

Originally titled THE CUCKOO CLOCKS OF HELL and running close to 3 hours, the cut of this film that finally made it's way to theaters runs just a smidge under an hour and a half. Naturally, what was lost during the editing was most of the plot. As it stands, LAST HOUSE ON DEAD END STREET has a plot only in the loosest sense of the word possible. The basic story is this: Terry Hawkins - played by director/writer Roger Watkins - is released from prison after serving a year for drug possession. Bitter and angry, with no real sense of purpose, Terry gets together a little posse of low-life nut jobs with the intention of giving the world "something they ain't never seen before". And what this one-time stag filmmaker means is snuff films. They record themselves killing a man and then take the film to a duo of porn producers. The producers are intrigued by what they see. Then they make a mistake. They steal his movie and Terry and his crew decide to seek revenge by making the producers the stars of their next movie. That's all the plot this film has.

The plot, however, is secondary to the individual scenes from which the film derives most of it's power. The direction of the film is nothing great. The whole thing is shot using a single, mostly stationary camera. The only time the camera really moves is when we're seeing the film through the eyes of the in-film camera man. The most we get otherwise are a few pans left-to-right or up-to-down and quick zooms in or out. But WHAT the camera is filming is most extraordinarily weird and grotesque. There is a scene in which a woman dresses up in black-face and is whipped repeatedly by a hunchback at a party. During the murders, Terry and his cohorts don strange, creepy masks which they pass around in a ritualistic fashion. There is crude footage of cows being slaughtered, a utterly repellant scene in which is man is forced to fellate a severed deer's hoof and the gruesome finale in which a woman has both her legs sawed off before being gutted.

None of these scenes are played out in realistic fashion. Everything seems off-kilter and exaggerated, more like a Grand Guignol play than HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER. The brutal violence meted out in the last twenty minutes is far from convincing, but the visceral power is still there. It's the sadistic glee with which the scenes are filmed, the kind of rub-your-nose-in-it attitude, that makes these scenes all the more powerful. Though we're not convinced by the bloodletting, we're enveloped in the nihilistic, suffocating atmosphere.

The sound design plays a large part in the hallucinatory, nightmarish and bizarre world of the film. LAST HOUSE ON DEAD END STREET doesn't have a proper score, just a random collection of bits of music, environmental noises and sound effects. One of the most effective scenes in the movie is scored to nothing except whispering voices. As the murderers prepare to slaughter a young woman, we hear on the soundtrack Terry and company whispering. There's an echo effect placed on the dialogue so the whispers begin to bleed together. It's hard to describe - in fact, you'd be better off stopping right now and watching the film - but the effect is so profoundly disorientating and disturbing that every time I reach that scene, I feel the need to turn down the volume.

You wouldn't expect a film like LAST HOUSE ON DEAD END STREET to be well acted and, surprise!, it isn't. But Watkins, in the role of Terry, is perfectly played. He is one of the most deranged characters ever in a horror film. His frequent tirades and freak-outs - not to mention the fact that he resembles a younger, coked-out Rainn Wilson - make for interesting and intense viewing. The rest of the cast are largely forgettable, cackling lunatics and utterly unsympathetic, sniveling victims but Watkins manages a fierce on-screen charisma. He possesses the same kind of grimy, sadistic charm that David Hess always had and his performance lifts LAST HOUSE ON DEAD END STREET out of the arena of other low budget shockers.

LAST HOUSE ON DEAD END STREET isn't as gory or cruel as it's reputation suggests but it is infinitely weirder than you'd expect. It is a nightmare of a film, the kind of film David Lynch would have made if he were drugged-out and hooked on horror films in 1970s New York, but it is also fascinating to watch, even in it's rougher moments. The film certainly has it's share of detractors but I have never been one of them. I've seen LAST HOUSE ON DEAD END STREET at least a dozen times in my life and it has held up throughout the years. For a film with such a lofty reputation within the horror community, I'm always surprised that more people haven't seen it. That's something that should be corrected as soon as possible.

Essential viewing.

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