The Last House on the Left (2009) - Review

I’m of the opinion that, if you’ve seen one revenge flick, you’ve seen ‘em all.  There’s nothing wrong with the revenge story – not really – but the formula that this kind of movie tends to follow is a bit more predictable than most.  Granted, it’s not as trite as your typical slasher movie, so I guess there’s that.  But I don’t know, there’s just nothing in the movie about which you can really get excited.  Girl gets raped and left for dead.  Girl survives.  Girl’s parents set out to kill the wrongdoers.

See, I’ve essentially spoiled both nothing and everything about this movie in those three little sentences.  But that’s precisely my point: you know exactly how this movie goes, even if you’ve never seen a movie like this before in your entire life.  It’s just really easy to follow, and yeah, there are some tense moments, but at no point in the film do you feel like things might not end up okay.

But I suppose that’s not the movie’s fault necessarily.  I mean it is a remake after all – it can only deviate so far from the source material before the fans cry foul.  Yet it also must stay fairly shackled to its basic storyline, else why call it a remake?  So how does the movie stand up on its own terms?

Insert Aaron Paul "BITCH" joke

Eh.  It’s fine, I guess.  I like Tony Goldwyn and Monica Potter; they give much much better performances than their characters really call for and really make the most out of a below-average script.  Goldwyn is one of my favorite underrated actors actually.  Plus, hey, you’ve gotta give points to Aaron Paul.  He’s always fantastic, plus he Broke Bad in this movie.

There isn’t a ton of interesting stuff to say about the movie itself, but I did read about director Dennis Iliadis wanting to steer away from the torture porn genre to show how “even the most normal of families can be driven to evil acts if pushed too far”.  Ooh, something interesting.  I have a pretty big problem with that.  The implication that revenge is an ‘evil’ act is not a light one to make, and I think I would make the same decision if I was in Goldwyn’s position.  It may betray my liberal roots a bit, but I don’t think I’d have any problem murdering a bunch of sadistic lowlifes that tried to kill my daughter.  Not much to say other than that, I just had a problem with the quote.

Either way, this movie is pretty whatever.