The Last House on the Left

Director Dennis Iliadis polishes up Craven's template to a lethal shine.

By dismembering Craven's landmark extremities, Iliadis celebrates his source for all the wrong reasons.

Dennis Iliadis's remake retains its ferocious power and provocative themes, and thanks to a focused script that unfolds in real time, it ratchets up the suspense and sucks us into a remorseless cycle of violence and revenge.

A dismal reminder of just how starved Hollywood studios are for good ideas.

The narrative structure is ingenious and sexual assault is at least shown as having dramatic and human consequences of some sort, if only in the context of revenge. Wasn't the original movie enough?

This clanging cover version believes in nothing, not even its own nihilism, and the horrors it portrays leave us colder, but not wiser.

Suffice it to say the film concerns itself more with doing Craven justice than any Swedish poets, medieval or filmic.

It’s well shot, well edited, the effects are stellar, the performances are solid, but it is a brutal film (for better or for worse) that not all will want to watch.

While this remake or Craven's 1972 classic is by no means watered down, it takes a different approach to the premise that allows it to stand on its own.

Impossible to recommend but equally impossible to ignore.