The first time I saw it in the mid-1980’s on a borrowed VHS tape that had a few other films crammed onto it, I never made it through Last House on the Left. And neither did the tape it was recorded on. During the agonizing scene where poor Phyllis is rendered gutless, the tape broke, ending my torture but making me insanely curious as to how the rest of the film would lay out. Amusingly enough, while I didn’t plan on finding out in a hurry, time has a way of speeding some things up. Not too long afterwards (okay, about four or five years later) I saw Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring and realized Wes Craven was more than a bit influenced by that classic film.

That made me go locate a beat up VHS tape another friend owned and watch it from start to finish, appreciating it far more by the finale than I did when I first saw it. Amusingly enough, I didn’t seek out Craven’s other films at all. I always seemed to be in the middle of something else when one would turn up on cable or in the case of a few others, I just decided to go to the movies and one of his films happened to be playing nearby. Some of his flicks worked better than others and a few didn’t strike me at all as all that frightening until seen again where I could dissect scenes without a chatty fraidy-cat audience screaming and talking over the better parts of the work. Continue reading →