Review of Last House on Dead End Street (Box Set)

Introduction

This release from Tartan carries with it a lot of cultish promise. This `notorious cult classic` has never enjoyed an official release in the UK on any format. Gore aficionados have long talked of this film in the same breath as the original `Texas Chainsaw Massacre` and `I Spit on Your Grave`, having viewed it on twentieth generation, barely visible VHS pirates.

Sadly it doesn`t look much better here, and it certainly doesn`t live up to its notoriety. It`s a bad copy of a bad movie. It even starts with a warning about the quality of this release (`Viewers are advised that the quality varies throughout…") and it must have been painful for some at Tartan, who generally issue excellent editions, to have been persuaded to put this out.

Still, I guess it has a market. This is issued by `Tartan Grindhouse` and is the first release to carry this sub-brand logo. They describe the release programme as `A slew of must-have releases for the depraved and the corrupted…` and, although I`m prepared to accept that that description might include me, this release just left me plain cold.

The movie is frankly barely watchable, with a scratchy print of badly shot material and echoey audio, often out of synch with the action.

The movie seems to be a horrible mish-mash of ill-advised Factory style art-house, with Herschel Lewis style gore. It will take some explaining, and it will be tough tracing the narrative to somehow reflect the tedium of the finished piece (it runs for 77 minutes but feels like hours) and not make it sound too interesting. One more time - watch my lips (out of synch) - this movie, despite the description of its narrative, which will sound very cool, is as dull as dishwater.

OK. So here`s what happens - I think. (It`s not easy to hear what`s going on…)

The movie opens with a heartbeat on the soundtrack, scratched footage and distorted audio. The man emerges on the screen, walking aimlessly around what looks like a college campus.

Terry Hawkins is a prisoner who comes out of jail with sinister promise to do "something nobody ever dreamed of before". "I`ll show them what Terry Wilkins can do…". His monologue intercuts with a bunch of extras throwing blood and offal at each other.

The narrative develops with him looking for a new thrill - a road leading him towards the making of snuff movies. There`s more than a whiff of the Manson murders in the air here…crazed druggies following their leader like sheep.
The dialogue is awful too with frequent use of phrases like `daddy-O` and lines like: "I`ll tell you what chicks dig. Danger." And "No one`s interested in sex anymore. They want somethin` else.". It`s crassly tasteless in the main with one hipster explaining that his chick liked a bit of the old `slaperoo`, for example. Not nice.


He gathers a team of equally disturbed reprobates to help him in his arthouse / horror house aspirations. These include a man sacked from an abattoir for having an unhealthy interest in the cows, and a series of bored females looking for a thrill. If you count a young lady on all fours, face blackened in the style of `The Black and White Minstrel Show`, being whipped by a hunchback as a thrill, then I guess they get what they`re looking for. But of course, jaded by these meek thrills, their lust for ever more disturbing thrills inevitably leads to the snuff movie theme that lies at the dark-heart of this terrible movie.


There is a killing of a blind superintendent of his apartment, which takes Terry into whole new realms of possibilities. He becomes a Manson-like Messiah to his debauched gang of followers, who seem to obey his every command. The film quickly degenerates into a bloodbath, filled with lots of blood and innards being thrown every which way.

Video

Unusually the case for Tartan, who generally do a great job getting the best print available and then mastering it expertly, this is absolutely awful. Almost unwatchable. The image is washed out, soft, and horribly damaged. This may be the best copy available, though that`s not saying much. Life`s too short to endure this sort of rubbish.

Audio

Again, absolute rubbish. Tinny, crackling, distorted, fuzzy, muddy, and frequently out of synch.

Features

Well, in keeping with the poor quality throughout the Extras (so plentiful they have been given an extra disc) are every bit as bad as the main feature. These comprise primarily of four `short films` by Director Roger Watkins. These amount to a mute home movie in the first instance (surely of interest to no one except the participants) which Tartan felt deserved an audio commentary. Give it a miss. This is followed by a series of marginally improving (don`t get excited - these are still amateurish in the extreme) shorts, ending with `Black Snow` which, under duress, you may be able to tolerate without hitting the `Next` button. All features carry commentary from Watkins.

There are also some `outakes` though these are every bit as poor as the main feature.

Conclusion

This is quite possibly the worst movie I`ve had the misfortune to sit through. It`s a crass and tasteless movie, exploring the relationship between violence and art, but managing to do it in as offensive a way as possible. The quality of image and sound is consistently bad, and any dialogue that can be heard is stilted and badly penned.

The movie is almost a case study of `how not to make a movie`, lacking pace, interest or anything even remotely artistically redeemable. It`s not shocking - just dull.

Looking into the history of the movie (made in 1972), it`s rumoured to have cost circa $3000. I`m guessing that at least $2000 of that was spent on hallucinogenics. The soundtrack was recorded on a tape recorder and later dubbed onto the movie, often with no regard to traditional technical niceties, like synchronised sound for example.

For some, this is a cult curio. It`s weird that a film so bad, about topics so taboo at the time, ever got made in the first place. That people should want to watch it even weirder. Perhaps you`d forgive me for saying, in summary, that this film is truly offal.