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Aug. 18th, 2009 12:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nigeltdeEric and Lafayette are just owning True Blood these days, and ASkars was especially excellent tonight. The show needs more Pam so they have some challenge in the awesome stakes. The Godric storyline has proved the best of all the expanded universe tangents and I really enjoyed Dallas, on the whole. Jessica and Hoyt are so happy and sweet and cute that it's creeping me out a little.
The Last House on the Left is an odd duck. It was on my radar because my sad-eyed boyfriend Garret Dillahunt has a leading role so when it was strongly recommended to me I was keen to watch. And he is indeed very good in it and this brand of his soft-spoken psychopath is built and walks around shirtless a whole bunch, which, awesome. But it's two more-or-less interesting movies smashed awkwardly together and as such is a little frustrating in the ways it doesn't work. The first movie is laid out exactly as you would expect after having read the two-sentence description in your guide of choice, and introduces us cleanly to the vicious thugs and haunted heroine who make up the two sides of our what-people-are-capable-of horror-thriller coin. There is a meeting, it is bad, and goes downhill, and eventually she looks the worst in the eye and is stripped down to the core of herself, to the life and will that allow her to defeat her foe, triumphant or tragic. Or so it's supposed to go. Halfway through, however, she is rendered helpless and it becomes the story of her parents who become the hunters themselves and gruesomely murder the vicious thugs in a series of bloody set-pieces.
We have all watched the first movie many times and when it is done well it is fantastic (get away from her you bitch!). This promised to be passable, thanks mostly to the villain, being a paint-by-numbers affair. When your first shot of the heroine is of her training as a swimmer, it's not difficult to see how the climax will play out (is it safe?). Indeed, LHOTL has her swimming away from her captors at the end of the first movie, but it turns out this isn't how she wins; it's how she loses.
The second movie is more interesting (the music coming up from the floor was our old friend, Ludwig Van, and the dreaded Ninth Symphony) but required much more investment in psychological realism and a much better understanding of who these parental ciphers where. Their devolution holds no tension; nor does the actual thriller aspect of it, as they walk around a while and bash a succession of heads in. So the climax is ultimately pointless and plot-holey, which renders the extended rape scene from the first movie gratuitous and really gross, where, had they stuck to that through-line, it was an arguably legitimate choice.
Changing narrative POV mid-stream is what sabotaged LHOTL. If you have a torture/revenge-torture plot, pick a character you can hang a movie off of. Aside from the main villain, who would have made for an interesting but difficult POV, and the parents, who are an obvious choice, two characters provided the means to easily turn these two movies into one good one. You have the lone female thug, whose recourse to same-sex bad-touching as proof of her status and psychopathy is completely undermined when the rape of the vic highlights her secondary thug status, and it's a nicely played moment by the actress. Then you have the unwilling, narratively useless, milquetoast son-of-villain who, with a bunch of revision, could have provided a really strong arc.
But instead what could have been a number of interesting thrillers becomes one poor, tacky piece of torture-porn that isn't even ambitious enough to reach for Saw heights, with a bunch of wasted characters and a good villain performance. Such is life in the big city.
The Last House on the Left is an odd duck. It was on my radar because my sad-eyed boyfriend Garret Dillahunt has a leading role so when it was strongly recommended to me I was keen to watch. And he is indeed very good in it and this brand of his soft-spoken psychopath is built and walks around shirtless a whole bunch, which, awesome. But it's two more-or-less interesting movies smashed awkwardly together and as such is a little frustrating in the ways it doesn't work. The first movie is laid out exactly as you would expect after having read the two-sentence description in your guide of choice, and introduces us cleanly to the vicious thugs and haunted heroine who make up the two sides of our what-people-are-capable-of horror-thriller coin. There is a meeting, it is bad, and goes downhill, and eventually she looks the worst in the eye and is stripped down to the core of herself, to the life and will that allow her to defeat her foe, triumphant or tragic. Or so it's supposed to go. Halfway through, however, she is rendered helpless and it becomes the story of her parents who become the hunters themselves and gruesomely murder the vicious thugs in a series of bloody set-pieces.
We have all watched the first movie many times and when it is done well it is fantastic (get away from her you bitch!). This promised to be passable, thanks mostly to the villain, being a paint-by-numbers affair. When your first shot of the heroine is of her training as a swimmer, it's not difficult to see how the climax will play out (is it safe?). Indeed, LHOTL has her swimming away from her captors at the end of the first movie, but it turns out this isn't how she wins; it's how she loses.
The second movie is more interesting (the music coming up from the floor was our old friend, Ludwig Van, and the dreaded Ninth Symphony) but required much more investment in psychological realism and a much better understanding of who these parental ciphers where. Their devolution holds no tension; nor does the actual thriller aspect of it, as they walk around a while and bash a succession of heads in. So the climax is ultimately pointless and plot-holey, which renders the extended rape scene from the first movie gratuitous and really gross, where, had they stuck to that through-line, it was an arguably legitimate choice.
Changing narrative POV mid-stream is what sabotaged LHOTL. If you have a torture/revenge-torture plot, pick a character you can hang a movie off of. Aside from the main villain, who would have made for an interesting but difficult POV, and the parents, who are an obvious choice, two characters provided the means to easily turn these two movies into one good one. You have the lone female thug, whose recourse to same-sex bad-touching as proof of her status and psychopathy is completely undermined when the rape of the vic highlights her secondary thug status, and it's a nicely played moment by the actress. Then you have the unwilling, narratively useless, milquetoast son-of-villain who, with a bunch of revision, could have provided a really strong arc.
But instead what could have been a number of interesting thrillers becomes one poor, tacky piece of torture-porn that isn't even ambitious enough to reach for Saw heights, with a bunch of wasted characters and a good villain performance. Such is life in the big city.
